hehehe Mauro that's always happen with horticultural names, someone with recognized respect inside the species group of collectors creates a new varietal name because it fells like it worth it, the name start to be used, others came I say that the phenotype was "described" 150 year earlier or have a "better" Latin terminology, them others say that they not recognize that thing because the referred phenotype was described as a part of a preexisting used name that creates more confusions than solve classification, and others start to note that many cultivars are difficult to exactly put in one or other variety, and Voila, confusion start to appear and reproduce itself like virus... With no exception it ends with the good effort of one grower trying to put some sense in to the potpourri of horticultural names mix with botanical terms, and ends with even more confusion, I mean, people that use the "new" system, people that use "old" terminology, and even people that prefer to use varietal "dialects"...
I think that Venezuelan collectors ended with the 5 standard "forma" plus type (alba, albescens, semialba, coerulea and concolor) just because we had with Cattleya mossiae so many "varieties" in the past (around 100-120), that collectors from my previous generation decided for simplicity it like botany does. We have here 5 unifoliates that have exactly the same amount of variavility, so imagine 120 varietal names changing names form species to species.... none have the memory to deal with 600 names or worst,120 plants just to say that someone have a collection that covers all the "basic" of the species.
With years I started to like the simplicity we use here of formas, but I still find some cases that had to be borrow from still used Brazilian names like "vinicolor", "rubra","mosca" and "aquinii" for the "rep-lipped", "very dark ones", "the almost concolor ones" and "the variegated/pleoric ones", or even old names like "Delicata" (amonea + amesiana in Brazil) and suavissima (almost semialba) to note something in the phenotype that somehow have a particular charm to be noted somehow. But the use of those names are informal and seldom usage or acceptance...
Since the 5 recognized formas here cover almost all overall color possibilities with the exception of color hue, them the labelum "color-shape" in Venezuelan case had to be described with words like stripes, veins, sprinkled and solid lip noticing if is necessary if that phenotype occurs in the Lobe (central, upper, lower,lateral) or something interesting occur in the throat or in the the margins...
You know, I find very interesting that these differences of how the major large unifoliate country bearers (((Colombia,Venezuela and Brazil) manage their species classification reflects on opinions even on
AOS judging members and book affirmations... I personally heard and read at least a 100 times that Brazilian unifoliates (specially labiata) are much more variable than other unifoliates with the exception of trianae, something completely non-true, even percivaliana, quadricolor and gaskelliana that occurs in very small geographic areas have the same variability other large unifoliates have.
:^)
Cattleya warneri var. pincelada
Linear Mode
