Sanderianum. you are right in what you say here except that we have very few Retail Nurseries selling Paphs now and because of the smallish number of Orchid growers, word gets around very quickly if a nursery sells wrongly named plants. Mistakes do happen but not on a regular basis, if it does then the seller doesn't sell to many more plants. The nursery these came from no longer sell Paphs. One other nursery that mainly sold imported paphs had the highest return of wrong named Paphs in Australia. No longer in business, health problems mainly I believe. There is one thing, a nursery is now offering to import Paph flasks from In-Charm off their catalog, what chance is there of correctness there???
Yes, but from my experience, after a while, people have to buy again from the sellers, no matter how bad they are. There is a kind of monopoly in many countries, where there are not that many retail nurseries.
In-Charm Orchids is quite reliable. There have been some hiccups, like some flasks of sand In Charm x Shin-Yi that turned out to be hybrids (many of that cross actually). They exchange pollen with several others people, so there may be a problem.
All the nurseries have had their mess, at a time or another Even Tokyo Orchid Nurseries, they sold fake Val x MM rothschildianum, that turned out to be St Swithin. They replaced without any questions when it has been realized. I think that the reliability of the nursery lies as well in its replacement policy. If the plants are not true to name, they must replace or refund, now or 10 years later when the plants bloom.
On another note, I know perfectly well as well that many, if not most, of the taiwanese nurseries have another type of "fake" plants.
The obvious is one hybrid instead of a sprecies, or one hybrid instead of another one. That's fine.
The not obvious is hybrids or species with different parents. Roth Charles E x Borneo sold as Rex x Mt Millais ( there are plenty around in the USA actually), that kind of story. They bloom, they are rothschildanum, so no one can complain. It is just "bad luck" if the plant has ugly flowers, but no one can quarel about the parentage.
I know it happens quite frequently. I like to get very selected plants, or rare forms. I know the history of quite a few plants, and when I see in Taiwan that they offer flasks of plants that I have seen last year in poor condition ( there are hangianum flasks like that, I have seen the "motherplant" pictured in Da Lat, and the Taiwanese that bought it. There is NO WAY he could sell flasks right now of its progeny). I passed sometimes pollen of my plants, along with a picture, to several breeders. Sometimes they had flasks of the progeny available within a very, very few months. They offered them to people unrelated to me, but unfortunately some are close friends, and forwarded me their emails offering crosses from my plant. It was a quite famous paph breeder, that disappointed me a lot with such practices.
Another example, I asked for fairrieanum album and normal ones selected from the Orchid Zone. A famous US paph seller, very popular, who was coming to Europe went to the Orchid Zone, and told me he forgot to take picture, but "here it is", with the flower stem cuts. I trusted him. When I rebloomed them after 6 months, I realized that first, some were not from the Orchid Zone, second, none of them were selected. At 500-1000$ a plant, it is a "little bit" expensive. They were exactly the same quality as the ones sold at the same time for US$25-30 on Ebay. I ordered 3 plants at 800-1000$ of the type that has a synsepalum similar to the dorsal. They bloomed as crappy fairrieanum, borderline pot-plant quality ( and no mirror dorsal !). What could I say? Nothing at all of course. But I have quite a large collection of fairrieanum, and I know perfectly well that the growing conditions were perfect! And anyway the mirror dorsal appear, whether the growing conditions are good or not. I have seen he sold sanderianum divisions "selected ones", that were just normal plants, and I got screwed up like hell with an emersonii album division that bloomed like a normal plant. He claimed that "maybe I inverted the tags". No way, I care of everything alone and myself. There are many stories.
Now, what I think about orchid hobbyists and professionals. I learned the "hard way" that making pot-plant flasks, or crosses is difficult, and has to be managed Army style. The price of the mother plant is that, the costs of everything is that, the result costs that, sold that, the profit is that.
As for any kind of activity, it is a "business". Some people are fair, some are unfair. But all the sellers have to think as follow:
"I put 10$ on the table to buy this, the market retail price is 20$, they are a little bit better, but I have competitors. So I sell 18$."
It is all about money investment and profit, many sellers have to think like that, or they collapse. So some can sell real Vuitton, some will think that mixing up some fake ones will increase the profit, and some will think that selling only fake ones as genuine will make a big, beautiful box full of cash. All people who buy orchids must remember this. It is a business, like buying oranges or meat. That people love orchids make no difference, it is and remain a business. Which means as well that if the retailers can have a "very good deal" from a wholesaler, they will think about the profit first, then the risks ( fake or not fake? How many will die if they are fake before they bloom? How much to refund? Some people are unfortunately like that).
