Thanks Tim!
Actually the pot the plant is in is not large right now, 4 x 4 x 5 inches, but it is in dire need of being moved to a larger pot, I'll go to a 1 gallon nursery can, which is roughly 5 inches in diameter and 6 inches deep. Its been 4 years since it was repotted last. It lives directly below a 1000 watt HPS lamp, though the distance is low enough it doesn't get burnt, about 42 inches below the lamp. Time seems to be the secret to bloom this. It simply is not a once a year bloomer.
As to the putative parents, I don't think Hera is involved, the foliage is too heavily mottled to be an all insgne-villosum group x rothschildianum offspring. The parents may very well be correct, as the spotting really says argus to me. If the barbatum section parent were superbiens or cilliolare I would expect an even larger flower, as the flower size relative to the foliage size is about what you'd expect from argus or lawrenceanum, less than rothschildianum.
The foliage is very thick and heavy, and the plant is slow to mature growths, both point to the possibility (not the certainty) that this is a polyploid or aneuploid plant. But until someone does the karyotype, this is merely speculation. The fact there are few hybrids from Neptune does point to the possibility that its chromosomes are not in a 'compatible' arrangement for easy breeding, hence aneuploid as a possibility.
I did not realize that 'Mars' may well be one of the original Sander's plants, that's cool. This means that this clone is 116 years from its first flowering, and most likely the seed germinated a least 5 years before then. So this clone is at least 121 years old. That's beginning to approach old even by a tree's standards. Antique paph indeed.
