article in today's WSJ about the big box store orchid business; they
got their picture of phal blooms upside down.

--j_a


Now Blooming: The $10 Orchid

Cloning Makes Elite Flower
Cheaper, Easier to Care For;
Red Oncidium at Home Depot
By TIMOTHY W. MARTIN
Special to THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
April 26, 2006; Page D1

Orchids, once the pricey, delicate flowers of the elite, are now being
snapped up by the masses at big-box retailers, grocery stores and
service stations -- at prices cheaper than a few gallons of gas.

Improvements in breeding and production methods have halved the time it
takes to produce orchids to two years. That has increased supply, while
new cloning and cross-breeding techniques have resulted in orchids that
live longer, look flashier and cost less.


Two popular varieties now sold at big retailers: Cattleyas (left) and
Phalaenopsis.
The Phalaenopsis, the most popular genus of orchid, used to cost
between $40 and $50 during the early 1980s but now sells for as little
as $10 at Home Depot. At Lowe's, a starter package of Cattleya bulbs,
which are commonly used as corsages, retails for $4, while Home Depot
sells flashy designer baskets of orchids in porcelain fishbowls for
$99, about half the price of a decade ago.

Orchids were popular in the mid-19th century in Europe, when
globe-trotting explorers brought them back from Asia, South America and
other faraway lands. One orchid in the late 19th century sold for what
in today's dollars would be close to $600,000. Charles Darwin wrote two
books about orchid cross-pollination.

Maureen Strange, a retired fashion designer, began collecting orchids
in the 1970s, purchasing them exclusively at small nurseries in
Homestead, Fla. She used to pay $25 for a Cattleya, and $15 for a
Dendrobium. Recently, she bought a dark red Oncidium at a Home Depot
for $7. "Every time I go to Home Depot or Lowe's, the first thing I do
is check the garden center and look at the orchids," she says.

Orchids now rank as the No. 2-selling potted plant, behind poinsettias,
up from its No. 7 ranking nearly a decade ago, according to the U.S.
Department of Agriculture. More than 17.2 million orchids were sold in
the U.S. in 2004, up from 8.2 million in 1996, the first year the
government charted orchids as a separate category.

Most of the new demand is coming from a previously untapped market: the
non-hobbyist who loves the look of orchids but can't afford expensive
ones and doesn't have the time or patience to pamper them. The flowers
are becoming increasingly popular in home décor -- to make a statement
in an entrance hallway, for instance. In the past, they were purchased
largely for greenhouse collections or as gifts, but last year, nearly
75% of potted orchid purchases were for personal use, up from 61.6% in
2003, says the Ipsos-Insight FloralTrends consumer-tracking report.

NEW CROP


See more on the cloned orchids hitting big-box stores."You can take a
potted-plant orchid, put it in your home, give it no light and no water
and a month later it's still alive and in bloom," says Rob Griesbach,
an Agriculture Department geneticist. Most of the new mass-market
orchids are hybrids that have been cloned, giving them identical petal
shapes, colors and shelf life. Many stay in bloom more than six months,
three to five times longer than other flowering house plants.

The three orchid species that dominate the mass market are also among
the easiest to clone: the robust Phalaenopsis, hybrids of Oncidiums and
the tall Dendrobium. Many of the cloned orchids are duplicated from
American Orchid Society winners. Some clones bought at big-box
retailers have re-appeared at shows and won, says Ron McHatton, a
certified Orchid Society judge who works for Worldwide Orchids Inc. in
Apopka, Fla.

The mainstreaming of orchids isn't welcome in every corner of the
flower world. "I came up through the old school," says Ned Nash, 53, a
one-time orchid nursery owner who left the industry in 2003 after
business slowed. He enjoyed nurturing his orchids over multiple years
at greenhouses in Santa Barbara, Calif.

Orchid nurseries that once were the primary source of the flowers are
feeling a "bit of a money crunch," says Lucinda Winn, a co-owner of J&L
Orchids in Easton, Conn., winners of hundreds of American Orchid
Society awards. J&L now relies more on the business from diehard
collectors, who search for rare species of orchids costing hundreds of
dollars.

In the late 1970s, the Agriculture Department's Mr. Griesbach led a
USDA breeding program to create a mass-market orchid. That meant making
the plant smaller, sturdier and longer-lived. Department scientists
started by reducing the orchid's three-foot-leaf spread to a foot, then
cross-pollinated it with fast-growing plants and developed an
appropriate potting-soil mix. The first plant hit the market in 1980.

Still, mass orchids didn't catch on until the 1990s, when growers came
up with the production methods and equipment to churn out orchids on a
grand scale. Kerry Herndon, owner of one of the country's largest
orchid nurseries in Homestead, Fla., was leafing through old
flower-society journals when he realized that the pricey
orchid-production techniques hadn't changed in decades. He bought
thousands of orchids from Taiwan and revamped his South Florida nursery
to resemble automated greenhouses popularized by the Dutch. Now he says
he sells 4.5 million orchids in a typical year to Home Depot, Kroger
and other retail chains.

With 2.8 million square feet of greenhouses, Mr. Herndon's orchids are
assembled for retailers like a car on an assembly line. Conveyor belts
transport large metal trays of orchids under "reverse osmosis" watering
units and into climate-controlled zones. "It's just not what you think
of as a nursery," Mr. Herndon says.