A short anecdote -
My very first international business trip was to Brazil in 1981. My company opened a ceramic pigment plant about 100 km outside of Sao Paolo, so I stayed in the college town of Campinas.
On the drive to the plant, I was sure we passed a place growing orchids, so I convinced my driver to stop one afternoon.
Acre after acre of lath houses, with benches of cattleyas growing in live moss. The plants weren’t potted, but they all had labels attached. It was a cut flower nursery growing pretty much the same plants offered as $40 mature seedlings by Jones and Scully. I asked if I could buy any plants, and they allowed me to walk the range, selecting by flower quality. The price? $3,50 for mature, multi-growth plants, and if I’d let them keep the flower, they’d knock off $0.50! (It cost me more to ship them back to myself…)
I have no idea the name of the place at this point, but I bought plants from them for several more years, and ended up selling cut flowers to my local florists in SC.
