"White Monkey" wrote in message
m...
Hello Katrina, It would be impossible to get a name for your Phal, there
are
thousands &
thousands of hybrids out there.
Maybe if you contact the grower/vendor, but usually when they sell
them
& know the
name, there is a tag.
Bottom line is that, if you must have a name then you have to
purchase
one with a
label. No name plants are less inexpensive but the flowers are still
beautiful.
http://www.phalaenopsis.net/photos/p3_yellow.htm
Cheers Wendy


It's not that I must have a name, it's just that I'm interested in having
them when I can, and I enjoy the research process. I'm startled to see you
use the term "impossible"... I'd buy "very difficult and possibly
impossible". I was able to identify a sale-table phal clone I got awhile
back as a "pink stripes", and in the non-phal's I have been able to
identify
my wildcat "Doris" I got off a market table just labeled "orchids", but I

Hi Katrina,

Both you and Wendy are right, to some degree. The problem is that for many
kinds of orchids, there are a great many cultivars that produce flowers that
are difficult to distinguish. If someone has a white phal, but no name for
it, no-one has a hope of identifying the cross that produced it since there
are so many white phals. This is what Wendy is refering to. As well, she
is referring to a situation where you have seen a plant that you want (say,
to order from a supplier who currently doesn't have any in stock), but for
which you don't have a name. But this doesn't apply to all plants, as some
species are more unique or less variable or less able to form hybrids with
other "species" or cultivars than others.

But in principle, it is possible to identify any hybrid if genetic finger
printing data were available for every species/clone that has ever been
grown. Or even if there was sufficent morphometric data for every species
and clone that has ever been grown, it would be possible to unambiguously
identify every species speciment, and give probable hybrid IDs (by computing
the similarity of each hybrid to known/recognized species). But this data
isn't widely available, and I certainly don't want to be the one paying to
collect it. ;-) Of course, if you know someone about as wealthy as Bill
Gates who is interested in the question, I would hire the folk required to
collect the required data once funding is in place. ;-) Both capable
scientists and their wetlabs are quite expensive.

Since you enjoy research, I would encourage you to do plenty, and to start
you may want to look at Eric Christenson's book on phalaenopsis. He deals
primarily with species and naturally occuring hybrids, but reading his work
with a critical eye will give you a sense of what is and what is not
possible, and the kinds of difficulties in identifying plants. But to get
the most out of it, you need to ask questions like, "what is the empirical
basis for this claim?" and "Is that judgement reasonable given the empirical
evidence he has given relating to it?" And once you have extended your
readings to other books on phalanopsis taxonomy, you can begin to ask
questions like "Is this judgement reasonable given all the empirical
evidence I have studied in all these references?" Once you get a better
handle on taxonomy, you will gain an appreciation for the fact that in many
many cases it is not possible to accurately identify an unlabelled
horticultural specimen. At most, you'd be able to give a list of known
cultivars that fit the description of it. And, at the same time, in
numerous other cases, it is possible, though sometimes difficult.

HTH

Ted