Orchid Collecting Mistakes

Ten Misakes Often Made By New Orchid Collectors and How to Avoid Them

This guide is not about orchid culture, it is about people. It was written with the goal of helping collectors, especially new collectors, avoid making a few very common mistakes that can turn our enjoyable hobby into a series of frustating purchases and stressful growing problems. 

This document and three others we provide form a set which together are a well rounded set of beginning resource for the new collector. You may wish to read each of these, so we suggest clicking each link and adding them to your browser's "favorites', or 'bookmarks'.

• Orchid Buying Secrets - A compendium of seldom mentioned facts that can help orchid collectors make better purchases.
• A New Collector's Guide to Orchid Education - A list of resources a new collector can use to learn faster.
• Growing Cattleya Orchids in the Real World  - A practical guide to successfully growing Cattleyas. 

Purchasing orchids for a collection is without a doubt the most ejoyable part of the hobby for most collectors.  Many collectors pursue their purchases with great enthusiasm and energy.  Unfortunately, it is also not terribly uncommon for the fun to get the best of us with purchases pursued to excess.  As with most enjoyable activities, discipline planing, and moderation can greatly enhance your success and enjoyment of your hobby.  Our first, and perhaps most important recommendation can help you avoid many of the mistakes described below. Don't do the most enjoyable part of the hobby. buying new plants, without first doing your homework.  Slow down, pace yourself, learn about the needs and characteristics of each orchid you are interested in before you buy. As a buyer, you are the only person who can assure that you have the available space (allowing for growth), and that you have a growing environment, personal schedual, and level of experience suitable for a given plant. Maximize your enjoyment of the journey. There's no hurry, you have a lifetime to complete it!

1. Collecting without a Theme: There are millions of orchid species, and potentially billions of orchid hybrids. To create an orchid collection, the collector should decide in advance what the theme of the collection is to be and work hard to follow that theme.  The theme of your collection is definition of the kinds of orchids you will collect. Your definition limits the orchids you will seek to a reasonably well defined logical group.  The theme can be species-based (Cattleyas only, for example), based on type (Terrestrial Orchids, for example), based on flower color (Blues only, for example) or any other subset of the total possible orchids you find most appealing.  If the new collector is to be successful, the plants in the collector’s chosen theme should fall into one or two of these groups and seek also to include only groups of plants that tend to have similar overall growing requirements, especially for temperature.
   
2. Orchid shopping rather than orchid collecting: Shopping flower photos in search of inexpensive plants with pretty flowers usually leads to collecting an assortment of plants of low quality and widely ranging requirements that are difficult or impossible to meet. It is also likely that the collector using this strategy will collect many plants that look nothing like their photos. Why this is true is noted later in 5 and 6.
   
3. Building a collection from mostly small immature plants: Immature plants are harder to grow and do not provide the collector with the reward of flowers. Most new collectors who collect many immature plants eventually becomes frustrated with their slow growth, infections, infestations, and other setbacks or losses in their collection. Collectors with many small immature plants seldom have them long enough to bring them to flower. Typically the result is that they either kill the plants or give them away. 
   
4. Repotting every new plant when it is received: Nearly every orchid reference on repotting Cattleyas states that they should be repotted at the onset of active new root growth, usually this is in the spring. Cattleyas, and for that matter most orchids, will suffer a serious set back if repotted at a time when new roots are not being actively produced. New collectors and even many seasoned collectors fail to follow this very important and common sense rule. The typical result is severe and often long term setbacks to the new plant. It can take a plant years to recover from repotting at the wrong time.
   
5. Buying seed grown hybrid orchids with the assumption that a good quality flower is likely: In 1922 Professor Knudson of Cornell University discoverd a method for germinating orchid seed in large numbers.. Orchid growers immediatly began creating hybrids with great fervor assuming the hybrid plants would have the best qualities of both parents. It didn't take long to discover that this assumptions was not only wrong, but very wrong.  Many of these hybrids produced flowers that were all inferior to both parents. With few exceptions the flowers produced by these crosses produced only a tiny percentage of worthwhile offspring. The amatures who bought millions of these plants assuming good quality flowers, and the growers making the cross ultimately threw out hundreds of thousands of plants (1). In her book Home Orchid Growing (fourth edition) published in 1990, orchid growing pioneer Rebecca Tyson Northen wrote "Now, in exploring the possibilities of new hybrids, growers make the untried crosses in full knowledge that they must wait for the result before judging their worth. And buyers who purchase them as seedlings also know that they must wait to see what happens." (2) The statement describing buyers as almost universally aware of the low quality results with unproven crosses .  This lesson that was considered common knowledge by growers and hobbiests in the middle of the last century has now been largely lost, especially on millions of new collectors and sellers entering the hobby during its recent explosive growth in popularity.  Fortunately, many of the large hybridizers have been in the business for many decades and have learned a great deal about inheritance and what plants are proven to be good parents. Many of the crosses made by many of these experienced hybridizers produce a few to many plants suitable for more thant throwing away.  On the other hand, these hybridizers also experiment as they try to learn more and will occasionally make crosses that produced nothing of value. Many growers will discard these plants. Stories of small sellers dumpster diving to retrieve them are commonplace. With financial pressure from cheap foreign imports some gowers sell their junk hybrids at low prices to inexperienced or unethical sellers eager for plants they can mark up and sell. 
   We recommend purchasing seed grown hybrid  plants when you can see the flower and judge its quality for your self. Alternately, purchasing a plant selected for its high quality flowers either by the grower or a seller who has purchased select plants from the grower's inventory.* These select plants from previously bloomed lots usually carry a higher price that is well worth the money.
   
6. Buying from flower photos: Few orchid photos viewed on a computer will have color that matches the actual flower. This is especially true for variety coerulea Cattleyas where accurately capturing the “blue” color of the flowers is notoriously difficult.  Many of the best looking orchid photos are those where the color is very different from the actual plant.
   
7. Buying by mail order from a picked over lot:  When you buy by mail, be sure the plant you get is not the dregs from a lot of plants that was already flowered and picked over by the seller and the seller’s local customers. The price may be low, but the quality is also likely to be low.
   
8. Misunderstanding Plant Size Designations BS and NBS: These plant size designations are inherently deceptive. Blooming Size (BS) plants can be a year from blooming and Near Blooming Size (NBS) plants are often 2-3 years from blooming. This means that NBS plants may even be what some sellers call seedling size.
   
9. Comparing plant size between sellers using pot size: Pot size designations are virtually meaningless. There are, for example, many sellers who routinely purchase plants in 2-inch pots for the purpose of repotting them to 4-inch pots for resale at a higher price.
   
10. Misunderstanding the word “Rare”: What a person considers rare tends to vary widely according to what they can find through the sources they know.  A truely rare plant may suddenly become available from several sources then quickly disappear and become unavailable again for years. Just because a plant can be found at your local greenhouse or from several sources doesn’t mean it isn’t rare.  Only experience can tell you what orchids are rare and which are usually available from the sources you know, and opinions vary greatly.
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* Neo Orchids was founded on the concept of using extensive travel to visit greenhouses for the purpose of finding items not listed in catalogs, and selecting  superior plants from the growers stock while they are in flower. We also frequenaly purchase select plants chosen for us by growers we've learned we can trust.   \

(1) Northen, Rebecca Tyson Home Orchid Growing (4th edition), 1990, Van Nostrand Reinhold

(2) Northen, Rebecca Tyson Home Orchid Growing (3rd edition), 1970, Van Nostrand Reinhold