By Jo Craven McGinty

Orchids have long been coveted for the beauty of their blooms, but until recently, the exotic plants were a hard-to-grow luxury that few could afford.

Now, the onetime symbols of wealth sell for as little as $10 in supermarkets and big-box stores. They are the top-selling potted plant in America -- and the single biggest day for sales is Mother's Day.

The secret to their success? Cloning.

Botanists can propagate orchids from seed, but they take years to flower, and no two plants look exactly alike. To succeed in the mass market, growers must supply plants of identical quality -- the same height, colors and impressive arrays of blossoms -- in bulk, and fast.

"By cloning, if you get 10,000 plants, the quality of the 10,000 plants will be the same," said Yao-Chien Alex Chang, an orchid expert and chair of the department of horticulture and landscape architecture at National Taiwan University in Taipei.

In addition, cloned orchids mature and flower in 12 to 18 months, compared with three or more years for plants started from seed.

The return on investment is apparent.

In 2020, Americans spent $276 million wholesale on potted orchids -- more than any other potted plant. Poinsettias, the favorite until orchids surpassed them in 2009, had just $157 million in sales in the same period.

Measured in pots, orchids exceeded 34 million units.

Two of the world's largest orchid growers are Matsui Nursery in Salinas, Calif., and Taisuco America in Aromas, Calif., a subsidiary of Taiwan Sugar Corp.

Matsui Nursery sells 2.3 million orchids annually with Mother's Day accounting for 14% of its sales, according to Teresa Matsui, the company's president and chief executive. Taisuco America sells as many as 2 million plants annually with Mother's Day accounting for 11% to 15%, according to Richard Muñoz, the company's operations manager and safety director.

Together, they will ship around half a million plants for the holiday.

Being able to stock the shelves of Trader Joe's, Home Depot and other outlets annually with tens of millions of orchids took a century of innovation, despite the plants' extraordinary diversity and range.

There are as many as 30,000 native species and at least 150,000 man-made hybrids. They are found on every continent of the world except Antarctica and in every environment, from deserts to tropical rainforests. No other flowering plant comes close in terms of species diversity or geographic range.

And yet early botanists struggled to grow these surprisingly adaptable flowers.

To begin with, they didn't understand how to germinate the plants.

In the wild, orchids sprout from seeds, but these seeds offer a host of challenges. They are the smallest of any plant in the world, and unlike beans or other seeds whose fleshy tissue nourishes an embryo, orchid seeds hold nothing in reserve to feed their offspring.

"They are dust-like," said Marc Hachadourian, senior curator of orchids at the New York Botanical Garden. "They make a poppy seed look like a coconut."

How, botanists wondered, was an orchid embryo nourished?

Near the turn of the last century, a French botanist figured out that fungi provide orchids and their seeds with the nourishment they need, and two decades later, a botanist at Cornell University devised a way to germinate the seeds in the laboratory by replacing fungus with a nutrient-rich gel.

While significant, these advances weren't enough to catapult the orchid to ubiquity.

That began to change in the 1980s, when Taiwan Sugar, or TSC, played a pivotal role in popularizing the plant.

Having been priced out of the sugar market, state-owned TSC began looking for a new moneymaker. It settled on orchids and invested heavily in tissue-culture techniques, a method of propagation also known as cloning.

Phalaenopsis -- the "moth" orchid that is prevalent in markets and big-box stores today -- became the primary focus of TSC's agribusiness division.

"Several people showed how to tissue culture phalaenopsis, but they didn't get a lot of plants," said Rob Griesbach, a plant geneticist who worked at the Agriculture Department at the time and is credited with developing the Toyland orchid, an easy-to-grow miniature. "In Taiwan, they discovered a process that could produce lots of plants. Instead of hundreds, they could get hundreds of thousands."

Commercially grown phalaenopsis are typically cloned by snipping segments from a plant's stalk where a node with a dormant bud is located. One stalk might have multiple nodes, and each can be propagated into a flowering plant that is genetically identical to its parent.

"You can make this one plant into three," National Taiwan University's Chang said. "After this, in maybe two months, you would do it again. Your three plants will get nine. And then again, and you will get 27."

Theoretically, a million clones could descend from a single gorgeous orchid. But because mutations become increasingly likely with each generation of clones, most growers choose not to propagate that many plants from one parent.

Learning to reliably produce high-quality plants rapidly and in bulk was a major advance, but getting them to market was just as important.

Today, most potted orchids sold in the U.S. are propagated abroad, with the largest number coming from Taiwan.

The challenge is shipping.

Cloning provides an advantage for that as well by allowing growers to pack maximum numbers of identically sized plants into uniform packing boxes -- a cost-saving efficiency.

"Earlier varieties were mostly seed-production plants," Taisuco's Muñoz said. "Though very unique in size and color, shipping them was quite the challenge."

Sixty to 100 potted clones, depending on how mature they are, fit into one ventilated cardboard box, and 520 to 600 boxes can be loaded into a 40-foot, climate-controlled shipping container for a voyage that will last about 18 days, if the destination is California.

U.S. companies continue to grow the plants until they are ready for the market.

In as little as four to six months, phalaenopsis orchids can be on their way to retail markets across the country in full bloom.

"It's too good to be true," Griesbach said. "I'm buying them for under $10, and they'll last three months."

Write to Jo Craven McGinty at jo.mcginty@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 09, 2025 13:11 ET (17:11 GMT)

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