Specific Families and Genera > Pleione and Orchidaceae

GREX names

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aldo:
If today you buy a Cypripedium Henric from seed, not a clone, you know you are buying a cypripedium hybrid, like all hybrids you know it can look like one or the other of the parents. It's the nature.

sjusovare:
I know this is an old post, but I just stumbled upon it.

I think the important point to considere is that we are talking of crosses between 2 different species (in orchids that's a GREX), and not just crosses between different cultivars of the same species (as for example tulips or tomatos), basically with orchids the grex name gives you the parentage of the plant, and then the cultivar name will give you its specific characteristics.
The problem stems on the fact that the word "grex" has several uses depending on whether we are discussing botany as a science or horticulture as a trade (and for some reasons, orchid trade nomenclature follows the voodoo of botany and not the commercial rules, hence why some intergeneric hybrids change of names every other week.. with some of my plants I lost track of what their current grex name might be because I grew tired of ever changing the labels at each reclassification, the cultivar name remains unchanged though).

When you cross 2 species of orchids together (or 2 previous grexes), you create a new grex, and inside this grex you might select some cultivars.
For example, Pleione Ueli Wackernagel is the grex resulting of the cross between 2 species, Pln formosana and Pln aurita, all the plants with that parentage formula will be called "Ueli Wackernagel".
Then, among all the siblings of this cross, some will be almost white and others pink, the pale ones have received a cultivar name, "Pearl", so when you get a Pln Ueli Wackernagel "Pearl", you know that it is a cross between formosana and aurita, and that the flowers are white or almost white, it's actually pretty useful and makes it easy to trace the lineage of a plant just by its name without having to search among all the different sibling forms which one it could possibly be.
As Steve mentionned, it gets pretty messy when people stop using the grex name and only use the cultivar name (or worse, just invent new names for the clone they have and forget to mention the grex), if someone sells me a "Pleione Pearl", I have no clue what that is, is it the formosana x aurita cross or something else?

I don't find diversity among a grex problematic, it is not a trademark precisely, so the idea of "when I buy a name it is always the same" is irrelevant, even with apples or tomatoes, when you buy a botanic plant, you will find it's different from another from the same batch, at the difference of trademarked clones or graftings (basically clones as well), which are all identical, and in case of diseases, all sensitive to the same pathogens, hence how we lost half the world banana production in a few years. Orchid hybridation remains one of the last horticultural domain where  pretty much everyone can contribute and participate if they want, while all the other fields have become the property of a few professionals.
For all the reasons others have mentionned earlier, there is no selection done for most of the plants grown from seeds, like the cyps from Werner Frosh. The only way to have uniformity in a grex would be to select only one individual from a seedling batch, then clone it and throw all the others, whcih is economically unsustainable (would need an industrial scale that would need much more potential buyers for each plant), and for some genus is not even technically possible (cypripediums and paphiopedilums for exemple are refractory to meristem cloning so far).

At the opposite, what bothers me is that mass produced clones, such as those phals or cymbidiums sold in supermarket and garden centers, are issued from selected plants, and should have cultivar names, but then, considering the commercial target, breeders usually don't bother naming them, they don't even bother giving the grex name so we can't know the parentage (which makes those plants totally useless when it comes to further hybridation)

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