Included in this submission all various letters from vendors, buyers, and growers, which I don't hink adds much to our quest. Ron summarizes what is in them below along with his assessment:
This came from the Houston center and has a bit of history attached but it's obviously not Phal. fimbriata. The plant was awarded in the spring/summer of 2009 and the current Houston chair is trying to salvage it rather than just dump it. This is the first of four emails with info and pictures. The award description reads:
Nine full, flat, symmetrical flowers on two upright inflorescences; sepals and petals chartreuse, proximal halves finely and nearly concentrically barred brown; lip white, midlobe overlaid purple, crest hispid; column white; substance heavy; texture waxy.
This has to be a hybrid with amboinensis or maybe venosa somewhere in the background. I think what's happened here as the plant passed through owners is the label has simply been mixed up. The string of letters tries to trace this back to Pascal Orchids in Java. I'm sure that's the provenance of the thing in Eric's book called the dark form of sumatrana but not this thing. Evidently David Hunt brought in the dark sumatrana labeled fimbriata, sold it to Mary Kaufmann who provided images to Eric who correctly identified the imported plant as the dark form of sumatrana, subsequently sold something to the exhibitor with that name and it's this that's gotten an award. Also, somewhere along the line, Selby identified something - the original import I think - as reichenbachiana but that's a bit confusing.
From the images I'll send along, it's clear the lip midlobe is erratically formed and, in most flowers, completely devoid of the bristles at the end that characterize all of these species. On one or two flowers you see a ridge of greatly reduced bristles as you'd expect from hybrids.
Phalaenopsis fimbriata J.J.Sm., Bull. Jard. Bot. Buitenzorg, III, 3: 300 (1921).
Phalaenopsis fimbriata, I don’t have an award number, has been confirmed to be an unidentifiable hybrid by SITF (July 2010).