When an orchid is selfed, what do you call the offspring?
 

This has been bugging me for a while and I feel maybe a bit silly for posting this but hey, I guess even those of us that aren't newbies still have newbie questions!

It's been on my mind for a while and I am probably way over thinking it. I have many seedlings that are the result of selfings and I am not totally sure about how they fit on the naming spectrum and adding the " x self" clutters up the tag and has me even more in a bind when it comes to crossing a selfed plant with another plant!

For example, I have a seedling Bc. Richard Mueller 'H&R' x self. Am I safe just calling it Bc. Richard Mueller? I assume you would essentially drop the clonal name since, even though it's a selfing, these are seedlings that may now express recessive genes or something like that. Down my rabbit hole even further - is it still a Richard Mueller?

On a similar token - if I was to cross two different Richard Mueller clones, would the resulting offspring also be Richard Muellers?

I feel like I know the answer to some of these but I second guess myself and I'm not hitting the right search terms on Google.

Thanks for putting me out of my misery!

A selfing would not carry the cultivar name - it is not genetically identical to the cultivar (children are not twins of their parents) The grex would stay the same (whether a selfing or a cross of two cultivars - named or not - of the grex) A particular cultivar may be named because it was particularly good, but those cultivars aren't registered anyplace unless the plant is awarded. (You can give your own plants any cultivar names that you want, if you want to distinguish one from another or make the recipient of a gift feel good.) A cultivar just indicates a particular plant, the name carries over to others only by division (certainly genetically identical) or cloning (theoretically identical). In the species world, cultivars (presumably, particular good examples) are crossed to "improve" the flowers... this is "line breeding", the results of which are still the species, but would probably not be recognized by the pollinator.

Oh, when two plants are crossed to make a hybrid, the first one is the pod parent (I think) and the second is the second is the pollen parent. (Someone correct me if I got this backwards) The reverse cross will carry the same grex (hybrid) name. So assignment to a grex is dependent purely on the parentage (pedigree) with no distinction between which parent is the mother and which is the father.

Hope this helps.

Yes, it's Richard Mueller (with no 'H&R' epithet).

Helping Roberta remember parental order - "Ladies first!"

When you cross two different plants the resulting progeny will all look fairly similar to each other. But if you self any of those progeny, or cross two of them, you will get enormous variation in the offspring. Some will look mostly like one parent, some mostly like the other, with the remainder everything in between.

Bc. Richard Mueller is a primary hybrid of Brassavola nodoxa x Cattleya (Laelia) millerii, a "Brazilian Laelia." The parents are very different from each other. A sib cross or a selfing of Richard Mueller will yield a wide variation of plant and flower shapes and forms. It would be very interesting to see a lot of the progeny flowering side-by-side.

Just to raise the confusion to a new level, when parents have a lot of variation (different color forms, etc. ) the offspring can look really different depending on precisely which plants are used. Just looking at a primary hybrid such as Lc. Interceps (Laelia anceps x Cattleya intermedia) one can end up with lavender, coerulea, white, splash petals, combinations and permutations of those - and they're all still Lc. Interceps. If THOSE are used as parents, it gets even messier, of course. So if specific cultivars are used, it's helpful to know what they are in predicting something of what the offspring might look like. But that's the sort of thing that hybridizers keep track of... not in the official record. If a plant gets awarded, it gets a cultivar name of its own but the cultivar names of the parents are not part of that record. (So dog pedigrees are much more detailed than orchid ones)