|
|
Hybridisation – Pick and Mix
The Hybridiser
Try your hand at making the most outrageous, gorgeous, or peculiar looking orchid you can using the Museum's touch screen interactive. And when you've made one you like, email it to your family or friends, or post it on your Facebook page.
Humans are great meddlers with nature. You might think with over 22,500 wild species to choose from there would be an orchid to everyone's liking, but the desire for new, bigger and brighter flowers has seen the creation of more than 100,000 man-made hybrids.
A hybrid is the offspring of two different species, and rarely happens in nature. Some hybrids can be a combination of as many as five different species. When deciding which species to cross with each other breeders pick plants that have the traits they are looking for, such as stripes, spots, small flowers, big flowers, scent, petal shape and number of flowers on each stem.
The process of hybridising wasn't perfected until the 1960s. Most orchid seeds won't grow without the help of a fungus to absorb food, so hybridisers developed a method of germinating seeds in flasks of a jelly-like nutrient mixture. Once a desirable hybrid is created it is cloned, and thousands of genetically identical plants can be grown in a single year. The orchid hybrid trade is worth more than $6.5 million a year to the global economy. |
|
Seedlings at the flask stage |
