("Red Velvet Cake" x "Zara") x magnificum "Mickey"

("Red Velvet Cake" x "Zara") x magnificum "Mickey"

This one leans hard on pedigree from both sides, which is a nice change of pace from some of my more speculative pairings. The seed parent came home with me from the IAS Show & Sale in September 2023, purchased at Doctor Jeffrey Block's booth for more money than I'd like to admit. It sulked as a runt for a year before finally taking off under some concerted babying, and now it's a proper mother plant, throwing emergent leaves anywhere from soft pink-brown to something closer to an arterial-wound red depending on the day. It's already made its way into a few other crosses floating around the greenhouse.

The pollen parent, though, is the one with the real story. This magnificum ecotype traces back to a wild-harvested plant from something like 80 years ago, grown for decades in the foyer of Mickey Carmichael's orchid nursery in Miami. Enid Offolter of NSE Tropicals was impressed enough by it, some twenty years back, to walk away with a cutting - at a point when the original plant was already thought to be 60-plus years old. Enid later donated a cutting of her own grown-out clone to an IAS Annual Member Dinner & Auction, where I ended up in a bidding war I'm relieved to say I won. Magnificum is thought to be a sprawling complex of subspecies and ecotypes, and there are plenty floating around under names like "Norte" and "Silver," but "Mickey" is the one I keep coming back to.

Put those two together and you get this seedling - young yet, but carrying a lot of history on both sides of the cross.