Pretty picture: Oncostele Wildcat

I'm curious about what was going on at this year's orchid show that led to the selection of a brown backdrop for the orchids. It wasn't as rough on the photography as the blue background from the 2013 show, but I'm so used to adjusting the color for a black background that I had a lot of trouble getting the color right here. And I'm pretty sure I failed regardless, though it's possible that the photo wouldn't have been any better on a black background: I can't remember how far away I was or what the lighting was like.

This plant has appeared here previously as Colmanara Wildcat ('Cheetah,' 2012; 'Bobcat,' ex-job). Whatever we call it, it is still what it is.

Oncostele Wildcat = Oncostele Rustic Bridge x Oncidium Crowborough (1965) (Ref.)

Pretty picture: Colmanara Wildcat 'Cheetah'

The tag said "Ons. (Colm) Wildcat 'Cheeta.'" Maybe not wrong wrong, but there's at least a typo, so now we're up to what, two wrong tags (and one no-tag) for the year. And we've only just begun.

Ons. is an abbreviation for Oncostele, which is apparently the same thing as Colmanara. I don't think I even want to know why there are two entirely different names for the same nothogenus: whatever the reason is, it will probably make me angry. So let's skip over that part.

I have, on rare occasions, tried to harness the power of the internet to break down a complicated hybrid orchid into its component species, and was thinking about doing so for this one, but someone's beaten me to it already. In the course of googling for something interesting to say about the orchid, I ran into this page, which gives most of the family tree, so it seems I've lucked out.

We've seen Colmanara Wildcat before at PATSP; one of my earliest orchid posts was for Colm. Wildcat 'Bobcat.'

In other news: I hope everyone is looking forward to tomorrow's debut of the sell-trade post as much as I'm looking forward to being done with it.

Pretty picture: Colmanara Wildcat 'Bobcat'

This is a really old picture, dating back to the bygone days of 2007. (How innocent we all were!) I've had it sitting around so long that I'm no longer quite sure why I didn't use it then, but I suspect the issue is that I either didn't think the quality was quite up to par (the image has faint vertical lines in it, which is something my camera used to do before I figured out how to take pictures with it not doing that) or that the flowers themselves were too similar to some other flowers I'd taken pictures of recently. I really don't remember for sure. Doesn't matter.


This is the only Colmanara I've ever seen. Other pictures I ran into on-line for this particular cross mostly appear to be a little less ruffly and a little less yellow than is shown in my picture. I couldn't tell you if this plant was different because it was mistagged (always a possibility) or cultivated differently or what. Maybe they're just variable.

Multigeneric orchids like Colmanara are usually given three names: the first (Colmanara) tells you which genera of orchid were involved in the cross (here, Oncidium, Odontoglossum, and Miltonia). The second name (Wildcat) describes a particular cross between two parents, which in this case refers to Odontonia Rustic Bridge (Odontonia = Odontoglossum x Miltonia) and Odontocidium Crowborough (Odontocidium = Odontoglossum x Oncidium). Any given cross may produce thousands of seeds, and each of the seeds, because it has inherited a slightly different batch of genes, may be subtly different from all of the others. The third name ('Bobcat') refers to a plant grown from a particular one of those seeds; all the 'Bobcat' specimens out there are clones from that one original plant.

Orchid genealogy is not a particularly interesting subject to me, but obviously both of 'Bobcat's parents were crosses as well, so the hybridization could easily go back several generations before one hits any actual species. Orchid fanciers do like to fiddle with things.

The reason why orchid names are often so weird (See the post about Goodaleara Pacific Truffle 'Surrogate Star' for complaining about weird orchid variety names. Also it's a nice flower in its own right, and is worth the trip.) is because, clearly, at some point one just runs out of descriptive words and has to resort to paging through the dictionary. I fully expect to see a Beallara Truckasaurus Matisse 'Ninja Breath' at some point very soon.