Pretty picture: Goodaleara Pacific Truffle 'Surrogate Star'

You know those spam e-mails that included a bunch of random bits and pieces of other text, in the hopes that this would fool spam filters into thinking it was a legitimate message? The name for this particular orchid reminds me of that. Nobody who didn't already know what it was could hope to have a chance of guessing what a "Pacific Truffle Surrogate Star" might be (some kind of marine organism? a famous gourmand?).



Is this necessarily bad? No, not necessarily, but if orchid growers are truly out of meaningful combinations of words, then they may as well just go ahead and just use numbers, because there's really no point to perpetuating this word salad. Memorizing a bunch of digits in some particular order is not appreciably more difficult than memorizing a bunch of unconnected words in some particular order.

But this is nothing against the plant itself, of course, which is a perfectly nice plant as plants go. Goodaleara (Gdlra.) is a new combination for me, this one being derived from genes of Brassia, Cochlioda, Miltonia, Odontoglossum, and Oncidium. It looks a lot like some of the other orchids we've encountered, particularly the Beallara Marfitch 'Howard's Dream.'