It happened four days before Valentine’s Day, in my grocer’s produce department. A new shipment had just been rolled out from the back room, triggering a full-blown swoon in some of Yakima’s more weather-wearied food shoppers. You’re thinking it was lush strawberries for dipping in chocolate? The first California asparagus? No, it was even more sublime.
Breathtakingly perfect Phalaenopsis orchids had been potted and beribboned for gifting our sweethearts. It’s been a long, long winter, and these pretties had us at “hello.”
The orchid family is so large (25,000 species) that it’s estimated that one in every 15 flowering plants in the world is an orchid. Found in nearly every environment (including above the Arctic Circle), the great majority are tropical. They can be epiphytic, meaning they grow on trees, or lithophytic, growing on rocks. Orchids that grow in soil are called terrestrial, and are usually found in the world’s temperate regions.
Not that long ago, orchids were for the wealthy, or the serious plant connoisseur. They were certainly not something you would grab, along with a bag of potatoes or onions, on a quick trip to the grocery store.
What kept them uncommon is the fact that orchids are notably difficult to propagate from seed. Unlike most seeds, dust-sized orchid seeds lack nutritional storage tissue, which made mass distribution from conventional propagation difficult. These days, new micropropagation techniques, often called tissue culture, and advances in stem cell technology, have made some orchids almost as the ubiquitous as ordinary houseplants, and just as affordable.
Depending on the orchid, it’s two to seven years from laboratory flask to saleable plant. Tissue culture is more expensive than raising orchids from seeds because the equipment required is costly. But since micropropagators can produce significantly more clones than seedlings in the same amount of time, orchid availability has increased and prices have dropped.
All methods of tissue culture have one thing in common: New plants are made from plant cells, rather than seeds. The concept may once have seemed downright Frankensteinian, but when you think about it, haven’t we all practiced tissue culture when we take stem, leaf or root cuttings? We divide the tissue of one plant, and if we’re successful, end up with two or more identical ones. Tissue culture is the latest method of the vegetative propagation we’ve practiced for ages. Orchid breeders turn one plant into thousands by harvesting a few slices of mature plant tissue and growing its cells in laboratory-like settings. As the clump of tissue grows, it can be divided again into many separate but identical plants.
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