What are the controversies around buying wild-collected orchids (xia shan lan)? Understand these clearly before you buy

Promote Chinese orchid culture, spread orchid knowledge

Every orchid enthusiast hopes to have a few novel varieties. Although increasingly modern science and technology have provided broad prospects for this, for any individual this is by no means easy; even for research institutions, the results are as scarce as morning stars. Therefore, people often pin their hopes on wild-collected orchids (xia shan lan). Wild orchids collected from mountain forests are what is called xia shan lan, and in some places they are called "sheng cao" (raw grass); they have always been the source from which people select and breed novel varieties. In our country, not only are all the traditional famous varieties celebrated for hundreds of years like this, but the exotic flowers that have stolen the show at orchid exhibitions in various places in recent years are also rarely exceptions. This is nature's gift to humanity. Looking back on the more than 20 years of experience of us orchid enthusiasts in Nanchong in selecting and breeding xia shan lan, we have many feelings. During that time, there was both the joy of success and the bitterness of failure. We believe it is necessary to reflect on and summarize this, so that in the future we can reduce mistakes as much as possible and keep the "tuition" to a minimum

1. Buy only after seeing the flower. The unity of price and value is common knowledge in a commodity society; the saying "you get what you pay for" expresses exactly this principle. A few orchid vendors also understand this principle deeply, and often in the flowerless season they select xia shan lan whose leaves closely resemble those of famous varieties to promote, loudly claiming how good their flowers are, and driving the price up very high. When asked why this is so, they answer: "Cheap goods are no good, and good goods are not cheap!" Clearly, compared with the trick of piecing and gluing fakes together and selling "famous flowers" at low prices, this is even more deceptive. In July of the year before last, the author bought a clump of spring orchid (Cymbidium goeringii) with unusual leaves from an orchid vendor in Fenggang, Guizhou; at the time everyone who saw it loved it. This vendor swore that it was a multi-petal exotic flower he had seen with his own eyes, and guaranteed a return if the flower did not match when it bloomed again. After more than half a year of careful management and waiting, this orchid produced a very ordinary flower. That vendor naturally never appeared in this city again. A fall into a pit, a gain in your wit. From then on, whenever a vendor loudly boasted about how good their flowerless xia shan lan was, our attitude was always: if there is a flower, judge by the flower; if there is no flower, no discussion.

2. Do not rush success. Lessons gradually made us smarter. Whenever we encountered a xia shan lan exotic flower with a high price, everyone always carefully examined it with a magnifying glass, leaving no detail unchecked. In selecting and buying xia shan lan exotic flowers that had not been tampered with in any way, we were also extremely cautious, checking whether they were stable and whether they had potential for development. Generally speaking, xia shan lan produced in the southwestern provinces, multi-petal and few-petal flowers, are the least stable; while a small number are relatively stable, and their characteristic is either no column (that is, no central column), or the column has relatively large variation (for example, appearing flattened). The stability of butterfly-type flowers is similar to that of multi-petal flowers. The stability of color flowers is also relatively poor, presumably related to temperature, light, and the lack of certain trace elements in the growing medium used. Some types of bi-colored flowers, because the plants are weak, do not perform ideally the first time they bloom again, but after the plants regain vigor their flower color and flower appearance are as beautiful as before. As for petal-type flowers, the relatively stable ones are those with hard columns, such as plum-petal or plum-type narcissus. In short, no matter what kind of flowering xia shan lan you buy, you must keep a calm mind, and by no means seek quick success and instant benefit by buying as soon as you see one. Once purchased, even if the flower does not perform ideally when it blooms again, do not casually dispose of it or throw it away.

3. Do not follow a map to find a horse. Over the more than 20 years of reform and opening up, many elite figures in the orchid world have written and published many orchid monographs rich in pictures and text and quite insightful, and these have played a tremendous guiding role in raising the appreciation level of the broad community of orchid enthusiasts. Many orchid enthusiasts have even used them as the basis for judging and buying "mute" xia shan lan. However, owing to the limitations of many factors such as region, environment, climate, soil and water, and historical conditions, these monographs cannot have every sentence be "valid everywhere in the world." Taking the book Lanhua (Orchids) by Shen Yinchun and his son as an example, the method popular in the Jiangsu-Zhejiang area of selecting plain-hearted orchids based on the foot sheaths may be repeatedly verified in many places, but for certain varieties produced in the southwest it is not completely applicable. If when buying you merely copy and transplant the book, the result can be imagined.

4. Avoid chasing trends and riding waves. In earlier years, the spring orchid crystal-leaf and "swallowtail" grasses produced in Guizhou once became hot items in the local orchid market, because they might produce crystal flowers and exotic flowers. Objectively speaking, such good things did indeed appear, but the probability was very low. The fact is, among all orchid plants in this city that produced crystal flowers, it is very hard to find any trace of crystal on the vast majority of their leaves; while some xia shan lan whose leaves were densely covered with crystal produced very ordinary flowers. As for "swallowtail" grass, the probability of producing exotic flowers is a little higher, but it is also not rare for leaves to be completely similar while producing ordinary flowers. The principle is the same as "Oranges grown south of the Huai River are oranges; grown north of the Huai River they are trifoliate oranges." Therefore, when buying "mute" xia shan lan, if you do not clarify the place of origin and handle it dialectically, you will inevitably seek "oranges" and get "trifoliate oranges," eating the bitter fruit yourself. Of course, there is no lack of people who have achieved quite a lot in buying "mute" xia shan lan, but reaching their superb level of appreciation is not the work of a single day. As ordinary orchid enthusiasts, do not deliberately chase novelty and seek the exotic. If economic conditions permit, it is best to buy from orchid nurseries that are reputable and strong, and this is the safest policy.

5. Refuse to buy seedling-grown plants. As early as ten years ago, some media exposed and attacked the phenomenon of orchid seedling-grown plants being sold by the bag and by the cartload on the orchid market, but the effect was very small. Many people of insight were deeply distressed by this foolish act of draining the pond to catch all the fish. Yet even today, seedling-grown plants on the orchid market have not disappeared completely. It is just that with the sharp decrease in wild orchid resources, the quantity coming to market is becoming smaller and smaller. Precisely because of this, some seedlings less than an inch long and as small as grains of rice have not escaped either. For seedlings like these, which do not have strong vitality and are also damaged during digging and transport, their survival rate goes without saying. Fortunately, in response to the phenomenon of indiscriminate digging and uprooting, governments at various levels in many major orchid-producing areas have successively adopted a series of administrative measures to prohibit it. As long as orchid seedlings are a commodity, as long as there is a sales market, digging and trafficking will not stop despite prohibition. If orchid associations in various places actively cooperate with the competent departments of local governments, step up publicity on protecting orchid resources, and adopt effective measures to organize the broad membership and orchid enthusiasts to start with themselves and refuse to buy seedling-grown plants, the effect will be even better. It is not hard to predict that the day orchid seedling-grown plants have no sales market at all is the time when wild orchid resources will be effectively protected.

Orchid Bar (Lanhua Ba), your good teacher on the road of growing orchids