A couple of Phrags.
The darker red is a lost label - a NOID. Obviously a lot of Phrag. besseae in there , and the flower is near to besseae size too , a bare 2 and a half inches spread. But on a young plant so may do better when more mature.
The lighter red is a larger flower, maybe 4 inches spread ; both are successional flowring; the larger one is P. Don Wimber. He was the guy who worked with the EYOF foundation making tetraploid orchids ; I don't know if he was the one who worked out the mechanism by which a diploid becomes a tetraploid or was simply someone who worked out better ways to achieve it - there had been crude attempts using colchicine for many years, but the process was very hit and miss before he came along.
For those interested in this esoteric subject , what happens when any cell divides is that the normal diploid ( meaning two) sets of chromosomes is duplicated, and these two identical sets then migrate to opposite ends of the cell. Then a wall grows across the middle of the cell, so as to provide two identical cells where once there was one, each containing the same two sets of DNA. By applying a suitable chemical, maybe colchicine, at exactly the right point in the cycle, the wall does not grow. Then when the next cycle occurs, there are four strands to start with, which divide to make eight, four go to one end, four to the other, but then the wall does grow leaving two tetraploid cells . I guess that Don did all this stuff under a microscope working with a single cell, and then the rest was "just" lab work to produce a flask of plants and so on - although I don't want to denigrate the skill involved in that - my own attempts at excising cells for meristem work were always dismal failures - and I wasn't trying to get a single cell - just a group of 50 !
Enough of this - just enjoy the flowers!
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Originally Posted by Dorsetman
