"No man is an Island, entire of it self; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main."
- from John Donne's Devotions (1624)

Donne’s quote is so apropos to orchid hybridizing, I did not make most of my foundation stock; I did not collect any of the species I have; others have helped me refine and extend my ideas; true, I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about my plants and doing research, but I would be nowhere without the efforts and generosity of others.

How or where do I start? Start with those that helped me the most, or alphabetical or chronological? Should I make a list or write an essay? No matter how well you mean when you start to thank people, you will invariably miss somebody important, or recognize somebody inconsequential, while forgetting your best friend but I want to try and thank all the fine orchid people that been a part of my success over the years, and I think I will do this chronologically.

In the mid-1980’s we were buying a lot of plants from the Rod McLellan Company in South San Francisco CA. Jerry Parsons was working there as a grower and in the sales area. Jerry became a very good friend, and helped us meet the right people to get things that were not in the catalog, and didn’t get into the sales area.

Jerry introduced us to Steve Hawkins, who was the Orchid Sales Manager at that time (or something to that effect). Steve would allow us to tour the orchid houses at McLellans, so we could purchase breeding stock. I traded pollen and plant material with Steve.

At that time, we were very interested in species and one of the first large private collections of species we saw belonged to Lil Severin and her husband. In addition to obtaining some great things from her, I was very impressed with her passion for her plants, and the stories that went along with every single plant. Orchids were not just something that she did; they were who she was.

We were very attracted to Angraecoids, and so we drove up to Grass Valley a couple times to visit Fred Hillerman and buy plants from him. I still have a Madagascan Angraecum leonis that I bought on one of those trips. I loved that Fred had picked a part of the orchid family that hardly anybody else was focused on, had he made the Angraecoids his own. He made his own greenhouse, his own heater that used wood, he made his own crosses, and he wrote the book on Angraecoids. I immensely respected what he had done.

Val & Jack Tonkin were leasing space in Watsonville in the same greenhouses that Robert Westcott was using to grow Herb Hager Phalaenopsis. We were going down there to buy Herb’s Phals, and I got hooked on Paphs. I was impressed by the Tonkin’s robust plants and their high quality. I noticed that there were better plants in their trash than some of the plants in my collection at that time. I brought away an appreciation for vigorous culling.

We quickly developed an eye (and a taste) for better-quality flowers. Frank Fordyce took us under his wing, and he helped us select some great breeding stock for Cattleyas, including many first-release offerings. I made a few Cattleya hybrids, but never took this type of breeding very far. For the quality of the stock we had, this was probably a shame.

Fordyce was leasing space from Helen & Maynard Michel of Orchids Orinda in Livermore, CA. So we started looking at the Michels Phalenopsis collection when we were visiting Frank. The Michels had a huge collection; we referred to them as the "Phalaenopsis Museum", because they had plants dating back to Arthur Freed Orchids. They had done stems for many years, and as such had a huge collection of Phals from many different sources. We began to purchase historical breeding stock from them; things that had proven their worth, and which may not have been fully used to their potential.

All of this had happened in about two years ... we were well on our way to becoming seriously serious orchid hobbyists. I had started to look into making hybrids, and had stacks of genealogies that I had done (by hand from Sander’s), and was learning all I could about a number of different breeding lines. One day, while we were buying orchids at McLellan’s, Jerry Parsons told us that Shaffer’s was closing, and selling off their nursery stock, and their breeding stock; he suggested that we really should go down to Santa Cruz and buy some of Shaffer’s plants. We decided to go take a look, and hopped in the car and drove to Santa Cruz one weekend morning in 1985 or 1986 ...

Shaffer’s had been a west-coast institution since shortly after WWII, and had shipped orchids wordlwide ... Keith Shaffer was a knowledgeable and kind man that gave much to the orchid world, and to the Santa Cruz Community. He will be missed.

Woody Carlson ran Shaffer’s for many years, and created a number of influential Phalaenopsis hybrids before turning his attention to Miltoniopsis. I am still using hybrids that Woody registered decades ago, such as Little Netsuke, Sand Pebbles and Little Pink Doris.

When we went to Shaffer’s, Richard Shaffer was managing it at that time. We went several times and filled our car with blocks of seedlings and selected plants. On one of these trips, Richard suggested that we stop spending so much on unflowered seedlings, and buy the Shaffer stud collection. That thought had actually never occurred to me. We had just been growing orchids for a couple years; while I was very interested in hybridizing, I had never sowed any seed, or flowered any hybrids at that time. But the more I thought of having a world-class collection to breed with, the more I liked that idea. Sometime in the summer of 1986, Richard Shaffer packed up the Shaffer collection in his van, and drove the plants up to Alamo, where we were living at the time. We began to do business as Whitaker Orchids, and I launched a hybridizing program. I am still using breeding plants that I made that first year.

In those days, the taxonomy of the genus Phalaenopsis was in even more of a mess than it is now. Herman Sweet tried to address this in his book "The Genus Phalaenopsis", which is still considered a major endeavor, and was credited by Christenson, when he recently revised the taxonomy of the genus. At that point in time, a huge number of species were lumped together as "lueddemanniana", and the registration of hybrids was becoming particularly confusing because several species including fasciata, lueddemanniana, pallens and others were all being called "lueddemanniana" by the registration authority, and many plants were erroneously labeled. Herman Sweet’s attempt to straighten this out was admirable. This was an important work, and I would like to recognize that fact.

It was time to buy some more Angraecoids from Fred Hillerman, so we called to make an appointment, and found out that his collection was near Sacramento being grown by somebody else. So I called Fritz Bieth to make an appointment to go buy Angraecoids. It turns out, Fritz was cloning select Phals and marketing them mail-order to hobbyists, and selling Phal liners to Nurserymen’s Exchange for the pot-plant market. As it was my goal to sell into that market, we discussed many ideas about breeding for vigor and other pot-plant issues. I ended up trading mother flasks of Shaffer white hybrids that I made, which he then raised and sold as liners to Nurserymen’s Exchange.

It was on one of many visits to Fritz Bieth that we first met Alan Koch. Alan was leasing some greenhouse space from Fritz. We were already interested in Cattleya-alliance plants, and Alan’s enthusiasm for his plants was infectious. He also had a slightly different approach to hybridizing than Frank Fordyce, so we started to also buy Cattleya-alliance plants from Alan. Alan was a source for a lot of information on Cattleya-alliance breeding and culture. In addition, Alan was the first commercial nursery that I saw that was using the new, New Zealand Sphagnum moss for media. Alan had almost everything growing in NZS. At that point in time, I was using NZS for my recently deflasked seedlings, but had not started to use it on many mature plants yet. Seeing Alan’s results encouraged me to try using more NZS. Eventually, I started growing almost exclusively in NZS.

About this time, we moved from Alamo to Scotts Valley (in the Santa Cruz area). We wanted to be back where the Shaffer collection had its roots. Not long after moving to the Santa Cruz area, we crossed paths with John Ewing. I traded him a bunch of flasks and few seedling trays for a bunch of seedling trays. He got Mambos, David Boy, Starry Eyes, and several other crosses from me; I got several pink hybrids from him. Years later, I would get many of these plants back, after John liquidated his collection and it was purchased by the Michels. That turned out to be very fortunate for me.

Stella Roccaforte and her husband Michael have been very active in the SF Bay Area for decades and have given much to many local AOS-affiliated Societies. She answered a couple questions for me that resulted in my first (and currently only) AOS cultural award, on Ancistrochilus rothschildianus ‘Whitaker’ CCM/AOS. I could not leave Stella out of this ...

We don’t see Terry Root very often anymore, but we used to buy Phals from the OZ when Herb Hager was breeding them. We also traded pollen with Herb several times. We need to thank Terry for the quantity of selected cultivars of Phalaenopsis that we obtained back then, and for plants that are currently in our collection, that have great value for breeding.

I like to sometimes make jokes about taxonomy, but there is no joke about Eric Christenson, and the great effort he exerted to clean up the taxonomy in the genus Phalaenopsis. Of course, he didn’t make everybody happy, I think that is part of being a Taxonomist, but we all owe him a debt of gratitude for taking the genus further than the previous efforts of Sweet. (We’ll just forget about that Doritis thing for now.)

George & Addie Stagi are two of the most special people that we have had the benefit of meeting since we started doing orchids again seriously in 2002. We owe them such a debt of gratitude for all they done to facilitate our success, from releasing great Phals to us that were part of Terry Root’s ex-wife’s collection of selected OZ Phalaenopsis, to being the purveyor of fine quality bark products to most of the other growers in this area. George and Addie are like family, we can never thank them enough for all they done to further our efforts.

I also need to thank some nurseries that have provided key plants or generally excellent plants; Carmela Orchids has supplied us with hundreds of yellow Phalaenopsis seedlings, many of which have flowered out far beyond expectations of quality; RF Orchids for supplying fantastic quality Vandaceous species which have been a part of our breeding program; the delightful and friendly folks at Lenette Greenhouses who we first bought from over twenty years ago, and who have more recently supplied us with fantastic Hilo Lips; to Mark Rose at Breckinridge Orchids for selecting and shipping over a hundred plants to us last year, many of which were far superior to similar things that we had been using previously; to Peter Lin at Big Leaf Orchids for his great eye, willingness to travel and for supplying some really great stock, and for being a really nice guy.

When I purchased the remains of the Shaffer stud bench in 1986, I received several crosses that were made by David McDaniel, including a number of plants of Ada McDaniel (Solar Flare x Rose Heart), which turned to be the best orange hybrid I had seen at that time. Not long after getting my website up and running, I was contacted by Dave, who wished to place an order. Small world. Now we are deep in collaboration on species improvement, and actively trade pollen, stems and mother flasks. We are both leveraging each other’s collections in order to create better populations.

I had been enjoying Dean Stock’s articles whenever I ran across them, and have recently been interacting more with Dr. Stock. He has been very generous with his time, answering questions and he even did guard-cell analysis on a large number of my plants, to help me baseline the ploidy of a number of breeding plants. This kind of generosity is exactly what this page is all about. Thank you, Dean. You keep up the good work.

So there a numerous others ... how about Linneaus, Knudsen, etc.? No man is an island, and there are so many that have contributed to the sum of Orchid knowledge, so that the rest of us can either have it easy, or push the envelope even further. To those I have left namelss, but nonetheless have provided much, I thank you.

Finally, I must thank my Mother Lesley for her unswerving confidence and support over the years, and her passion to see the fruits of my efforts shared with others. Thanks, Mom. ;-)

Any success that I can claim is due in no small part to the kindness, effort, generosity and examples of all these fine people and more. I owe many of them a debt that I can never repay.

rob't
Robert Bedard
Santa Cruz, CA
May 2006