2014 Sarcochilus Breeding update:

These year so far lots of great crosses with pods on plants, still we have to get through the long hot summer ahead with viable pods left at the end, finger crossed!

Our general approach this year –

• In our opinion species Sarcochilus are still great to grow, interesting and often some of the best plants. We are still making species including continuing line breeding hartmannii, falcatus and fitzgeralldii. This year we made a couple of stunning hartmannii crosses, fingers crossed the seedpods will hang in there. We also deflasked a number of species including rare ones like serralatus & spatulatus. We are waiting for our current round of fitzgeraldii & falcatus seedlings to mature before the next round of line breeding.
• Like many genus Sarcochilus have been effected by “ebayitis” to some degree ie the pursuit of crosses with single spectacular flowers that look good on ebay and on photo tags etc. This is fine but in our orchid house large crystalline whites with upright or nicely arching racemes that don’t need staking are the stand out Sarcochilus every spring bar none. Coloured flowers are also good but if they open 1 flower at s time or their racemes are wonky and all over the place then they just don’t put on that great a display. This problem is particularly evident in some of the current crop of yellow breeding unfortunately where the rush to make $50-$100 per seedling has led to a flurry of breeding including some sub par plants. When you consider the 2 main parents in yellow breeding are hirticalcar and hartmannii there really is no reason to have flowers coming through with poor substance & presentation.

When breeding rather than looking for single flowers or parents with crazy contrasting colours we select for the overall quality of the display on a whole. Things like the entire racemes shape and presentation, the size of the flowers, longevity of the flowers and the number of racemes in a young plant.

• Colour – when breeding for colour our current breeding is aiming to stablise the many and varied colours and while we are breeding some yellows of course we have made for more crosses working on other colours, particularly the more interesting shades of red & pink into the rust colours and browns.

Hopefully we will be able to offer this years crosses to you in a couple years when they are ready

Goodluck for the summer ahead!