Ten Thousand Stems

Laura Avery
Mirror contributing writer

   Of all the blooming plants on the market today, none more perfectly represents the concept of a “hot house flower” than the delicate, impossibly perfect orchid.
   Orchids are not known for their smell, although customers invariably bend close to the blooms to sniff, but for pure visual fantasy and drama, it is hard to find a plant that people are more willing to stand and contemplate. Many good orchid growers are also accomplished lab technicians, because it is in the lab that orchids are replicated and hybridized to bring fully flowering specimens to market, an average of three years later.
   Home growers are thrilled to separate new growth from their beloved specimens and propagate their plants one at a time, but retail growers are able to culture 1,000 plants from a one-tenth square centimeter of new growth. They must do so in order to keep enough mature plants in bloom at any one time.
   Kathy Cosgrove, owner of Cosgrove Cymbidium orchid farm maintains 13,000 young plants in her lab, and an additional 50,000 leafing plants in various indoor/outdoor settings in order to keep between fifty and 200 plants in bloom for her farmers’ markets.
   While growing fifty thousand orchids at a time sounds like bigtime stuff, Cathy notes that it is the imports that have put orchids everywhere for people to see and buy at places like Trader Joe’s and Costco. Huge former sugar warehouses in Taiwan have been converted to growing labs for acres of plants, which are shipped overseas by the container load. Customers can now pick up an orchid while they are waiting in the check out line. This has not been the death knell for small growers like Kathy, however. She has noticed that the omnipresence of orchids has made it possible for practically anyone to imagine themselves a first-time orchid owner and, with her manageably-sized business, she is able to capitalize on the public’s increased interest in exotic blooming plants.
   Kathy used to grow for other commercial growers and ship starter specimens all over the state, but her focus now is on her own production for farmers’ markets. She enjoys the contact with her customers, and she likes giving the plants she has raised for three years a proper send off with their new owners.
   To clone an orchid, Kathy goes into white-coated lab technician mode. She cuts a small piece off of a rooted new growth, sterilizes it in a 10 percent chlorine solution, then places it in a test tube filled with a sterile liquid growing medium. The tissue is kept under light and climate controlled conditions, and the tubes are rotated at timed intervals. As these samples begin to grow, they too are cut into even more pieces and cultured for growth. The whole process is not unlike making a batch of sourdough, says Kathy, with a laugh. One small starter yields many offspring. This process is basically a cloning procedure, in which exact replicas of the parent plant are produced.
   Hybridization is accomplished, again in a lab environment, by brushing some pollen from one bloom onto the ovary of another. After pollinization, a fruit pod develops in the stem behind the pollinated bloom and the stem begins to swell. After 90 to 120 days the pod is harvested, split open, and the seeds (embryos) inside are planted and kept in ideal growing conditions for about eighteen months. Kathy herself has made over one thousand hybrids, but she has registered only two – a Phalaenopsis “Colleen Siobbhan” and a Cymbidium “Madame X.”
   It is expensive to register hybrids with the Royal Horticultural Society, so for her own edification, Kathy numbers her hybrids and keeps a record of the parent stud plant.
   Orchids can live for ten years, and Kathy herself has a Cymbidium that is thirty-five years old. While they take at least three years to flower, the exquisite orchid blooms can last for months on the plants, and well-kept orchids tend to produce new growth each year which even the amateur grower can split off and replant. Orchid growers formulate their own signature potting mixes, which consist mainly of some sort of wood chips and other highly porous growing media. Many orchids can take some bright sunlight and do equally well inside and out.
   Selling an orchid plant to a new customer is the beginning of a long term relationship between the buyer and the plant. It is satisfying to bring home such a marvel of the plant kingdom in full bloom and visual perfection, and to be able, with a little coaching from Kathy, to perpetuate it indefinitely. She has managed to take a little of the mystery out of the lab and the greenhouse and to bring some of her life’s work to a farmers’ market near you.