Understanding Cattleya Orchids

Video Transcript

"WILLIAM HUTCHINSON: Many orchids get their name from an arrangement that exist between the person who discovers the plant and the person who pays the bill for the explorer to go out into the tropics and jungles to find the plants. The Cattleya group is just such a group named for William Cattleya or Cattley. He provided the money for John Lindley to go out and find the orchid in the wild. And it is the orchid that most of us readily identify when we see it as being an orchid. It tends to be large, it tends to be very showy and sometimes are based upon the way they bred them almost overwhelming when you see the plant and flower. The plants today are being bred not as corsage orchids as they used to be back in the early 1900's but now they've grown simply to be plants grown for show."