I was in the supermarket earlier today, and in the florist section, among the displays of cut flower bouquets was a table of potted orchid plants.
I remember in fiction, saying that someone grew orchids was to say that they were wealthy, sophisticated and had the time to tend to them. For example, I don’t remember reading any of the Nero Wolfe novels but the character was portrayed as a cultivator of rare and exotic orchids in a greenhouse attached to his house. There were other characters like that but I can’t remember any at the moment.
Now they’re something you can buy casually, along with the toothpaste and ketchup.
So when was that? And why was it not possible to clone orchids before that date? Was there some technological advance that allowed them to become commonplace?
There are grocery store orchids, and there are Nero Wolf orchids. My mother has both. The grocery store orchids (often phalaenopsis) are showy but aren’t too hard to keep alive, whereas some more exotic orchids are more fussy, more rare, and expensive.
I don’t know the exact date, but it wasn’t possible to clone them before that because nobody knew how to clone them before that. “Cloning” in this case isn’t simply rooting a cutting (that works for some plants, not for all.) It is taking a small section of a plant and growing it in a sterile medium using nutrients and growth hormones. At least by the early 1990s (when I was in high school) educational science supply companies were selling kits for cloning African Violets. But the problem is that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. Besides the lab-like conditions, different plants need different media, different nutrients in different proportions with different schedules, different temps, etc. Many need specific hormones, which then must be lab produced and made available. And those proper conditions have to be learned by trial and error. But once it is figured out, rare plants can become as common as the market demands. I have bought some seriously rare carnivorous plants (such as the Australian pitcher plant) for $2.00-$3.00 in a cup at Wal-Mart (or similar places) thanks to cloning. I once looked into playing aroundwith itmyself, but realized that I couldn’t (cheaply) maintain the strict environmental conditions. (The closest I got was using gibberellic acid to treat seeds, which is one of those things that has to be discovered and mass produced.)
Oh, BTW, those tropical orchids you buy by the toothpasre are going to die pretty quickly if you don’t have that greenhouse/hothouse. Just because they are cheap doesn’t mean they are easy.
Commercial cloning uses a few undifferentiated cells from the growth tip of the plant stem. These cells are placed in a liquid environment where they will divide but remain individual cells. It’s a binary operation, so after a while you have 65,535 cells for each one you started with.
These cells are then allowed to resume growing and each produces an orchid. It is very high tech and requires expensive equipment and expensive hired help.
not necessarily true, We have potted orchids in out house that are 20 years old that have just been shoved on a windowsill in bathrooms etc. that are perfectly happy and continue to flower and we’ve done nothing to them…nothing, not even watered for the bathroom ones.
A lot of the supermarket orchids are easy to maintain. I tend to kill indoor plants, but I’ve had decent success with phalaenopsis – which are quite beautiful, with long-lived flowers. There’s a reason you often see them in the ladies’ room in a fancy restaurant. They look fancy but aren’t hard to maintain.
In the wild, orchids need to germinate in the presence of a specific fungus to survive; orchid seed is dust-like, and doesn’t have enough food stores for the seedling to survive until it’s growing strongly and photosynthesising its own food, unlike other plants. This means that you can’t just bung orchid seed in soil and grow it. You can, however, grow it under sterile conditions in agar with added sugars and nutrients, because the food is right there, and once it’s past the seedling stage, it can survive without the fungal partner. You can also micropropagate, like people have said.
Both of these techniques suddenly exploded fairly recently. A lot of the orchids you’ll see are hybrids, including basically all the Phaleonopsis. Some of these hybrids don’t actually have a fungal partner they can form a partnership with; they would not germinate in the wild, which is why you’re also probably seeing more colour and size variation (though the blue ones are just dyed).
It’s one thing to propagate. It’s another to do it on an industrial scale. This video shows an enormous orchid factory in the Netherlands. It’s as highly automated as almost any other factory and this automation helps keep the price down: Behind the scenes at Ter Laak Orchids - YouTube
Thanks for all the answers and for this video. The greenhouse in it is massive. It reminded me of this article from National Geographic, about how Dutch universities and agriculture are developing intensive agriculture in enormous greenhouses, as large as 175 acres, where they do things like produce twenty tons of potatoes per acre, compared to the average elsewhere of nine.
Seconding (or thirding) that moth orchids (Phalaenopsis) like the “cheap” ones in the supermarket can be kept growing and reblooming without hothouse conditions.* Just don’t follow that idiotic advice on the label to water by putting an ice cube in the pot. Believe me, a constant drip of icy water is not what a warm climate plant wants.
And don’t let them sit in a saucer of water either.
*I have a mini-Phal that’s been abused/ignored during my recent move but is hanging in there. A fussier orchid would be long gone.