Floricultura don’t sell to the public, or even to garden centres. Their business is to produce and develop new varieties which they sell to the cultivators who grow the plants at scale.
They have more than 180 varieties in their catalogue, but several hundred more in development, because the demand for novelty and development never ceases.
“You can’t stop, because it takes so long to develop new varieties,” says Stefan Kuiper, the company’s breeding manager.
“You have to go on, [or] you will be behind the rest.”
After genetic screening and initial selection, the plants (the first attempts at a new variety, siblings from the parent orchids) take around three years to grow, first in lab conditions and then in greenhouses, but there are still years to run in the development stage.
Breeding, says Paul Arens of Wageningen University & Research, “is the art of throwing away”, discarding those plants which don’t match your ambitions, but it also the art of multiplying what’s left.
Because the next batch of plants won’t be siblings; they will instead be exact copies of the ones which survived the selection round – clones.
“In the beginning, everybody had the seedlings, so the crossing and then the seed pods give plants, but we at Floricultura introduced meristems,” Stefan Kuiper tells me.
Meristems are the cells which allow a plant to continue growing through its life, and it’s these which are used to clone the surviving plants.
Stefan can’t explain more about the technique they use – like the genetic research it’s a trade secret.
However, the cloned seedlings are cultivated and grown, again over years, to another selection point.
Young plants are sent to Poland and India for evaluation
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