Mericlone - what does this mean?
 

If a vendor has the word mericlone in the description of the plant, does that mean that the plant is a "teeny" little fellow or it has been crossed with itself?

thanks

A mericlone is a cloned copy of the parent plant. It's made by taking pieces of the parent orchid and growing new plants from the taken tissue. In other words, it did not start as a seed and was probably made in a lab.
It's actually really neat if you have a very nice orchid and you want others made that are *exactly* identical to the first.

Dito.
They take the undifferientiated meristematic tissue of the plant to grow new copies. You can find this tissue under the sheaths of spikes on phals and at the base of pseudobulbs I believe. They look like a tiny nub

Although mericlones should be identical to the parent plant, there is an inherent rate of mutation in any cell division (not just mericloning). And the farther you push the cloning, the worse it gets. Would you rather get a copy of an original document, or a copy of a copy of a copy of one? Exactly...

But, for all practical purposes, a mericlone should be considered a faithful copy of the original plant. The vast majority of them will be.