Registering a hybrid

Who keeps the register

The Royal Horticultural Society. It states on its own registration page that it is the International Registration Authority for orchid hybrids, and the International Society for Horticultural Science’s directory (opens in a new tab) of International Cultivar Registration Authorities lists the RHS against Orchidaceae, with the scope spelled out: greges only, and cultivar registration for one genus, Pleione. The registrar works from RHS Garden Wisley.

The scale is worth knowing before you write to them. The RHS says the fees pay for registering more than four thousand new orchid names every year. What comes out is the International Orchid Register (opens in a new tab), searchable both ways — a grex name returns its parentage, and a pair of seed and pollen parents returns the grexes already made from them. Early entries whose parentage was never recorded show it as na or uk rather than pretending to know.

In print it is the annual supplement to the International Register and Checklist of Orchid Hybrids, which most people call Sander’s List. The quarterly supplements that used to come with The Orchid Review ran from 2005 until October 2022 and were replaced by the annual list (opens in a new tab). The hybrids on this site come from those lists, which is why each one carries the issue it was published in.

Registering a hybrid

Six steps, and the order matters — the plant comes before the paperwork, and the name comes before the fee.

1. Flower it first. The RHS accepts an application on the understanding that live plants of the named hybrid really exist, and says an application shown to rest on an anticipated hybrid may be cancelled. There is no registering a cross you have not seen open.
2. Check the cross is not already registered. Search the register (opens in a new tab) by parentage rather than by name: it is the parents that tell you whether the grex exists, because somebody else’s name for the same cross is the name you will be given.
3. Write both parents the way the form asks for them. Each parent is a genus, then a species epithet or a grex epithet, and optionally that parent’s own cultivar epithet. The form also asks whether you authorise those parental cultivar epithets to be disclosed.
4. Bring two grex epithets, not one. The application form (opens in a new tab) has a box for a first choice and a box for a second, and says two must be given. The rules in the next section are what decides between them.
5. Fill in the rest, including the originator question. Your title, name, address and country; the date you made the cross and the date of first flowering; a short description of the first flowers; and one of three declarations about the originator — that you are them, that they are unknown, or that they consented, are no longer extant, or have not answered a written request sent more than three months ago. A colour photograph helps any application and is required for a primary cross between two species and for a new hybrid genus.
6. Send it, then pay. Either the RHS’s registration portal (opens in a new tab) online, or the form by post or e-mail (opens in a new tab) to the registrar at Wisley. Nothing is paid up front: the registrar invoices you once the application has been accepted.

The fee on 12 September 2026 was £12 per name on the RHS’s registration page (opens in a new tab), which is also the figure on the application form as last updated in September 2023. Its postal page still quoted an older £10 on the same day, so take the amount from the invoice rather than from either page. A hard-copy certificate posted outside the UK costs a further £12 on top; a digital one costs nothing extra.

One thing that surprises people: the genus you apply under is not necessarily the genus you get. The register follows the generic limits set out in Genera Orchidacearum, you may apply using whichever genera you prefer, and the hybrid is assigned to an appropriate genus when it is accepted.

What the name has to pass

Grex, Group and cultivar epithets are governed by the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants — the ninth edition, Brickell and others, 2016, which supersedes the 1993 Handbook on Orchid Nomenclature and Registration that older growers will remember. The RHS publishes a summary of the rules (opens in a new tab), and these are the ones that most often send a name back:

• Thirty characters at most. There is no limit on how many words fit inside that.
• It must not repeat the genus. A person’s middle name that duplicates the genus is abbreviated to an initial instead.
• It must not exaggerate the plant. Best of All is refused.
• Fourteen words are refused outright: cultivar, form, grex, group, hybrid, maintenance, mixture, selection, sport, series, strain, variety, improved, transformed.
• The punctuation is a closed list: apostrophe, comma, up to two non-adjacent exclamation marks, full stop, hyphen, forward slash, backslash. No other symbols and no fractions, so Million Dollars passes and $Million does not.
• A living person’s name needs that person’s consent, and a grex epithet must not be repeated within its genus.

There is more in the summary than this, including how a Group is established inside an existing grex for a remake whose parents are not different enough to be a new grex. Read it before you settle on a name rather than after the registrar has written back.

Who judges and awards

Registering a name is not the same act as having a plant judged. The RHS says a registered hybrid becomes eligible for entry into shows and for awards; who gives those awards depends on where you grow.

• The RHS Orchid Expert Group (opens in a new tab) — Britain. Formed in 1889. It meets around the country, works with local orchid societies, and assesses more than two hundred orchids for RHS Plant Awards a year. The round-up of those awards appears in The Orchid Review (opens in a new tab), which has been an annual yearbook since autumn 2023.
• The American Orchid Society (opens in a new tab) — the United States and Canada. Judging runs at dozens of judging centres staffed by hundreds of volunteer judges, at monthly judgings, AOS-sanctioned shows and affiliated-society outreach judgings. Its awards (opens in a new tab) score flower quality out of a hundred — 75 to 79 is an HCC, 80 to 89 an AM, 90 and over an FCC — and score culture separately, a CCM at 80 to 89 and a CCE at 90 and over. The CBR, CHM, AD, AQ and JC mark species, new breeding directions and whatever a panel wants to recognise that a score does not carry. A first award to a species needs its identification verified by the society’s Species Identification Task Force. Awards are recorded in OrchidPro (opens in a new tab), which asks you to sign in.
• The Australian Orchid Council (opens in a new tab) — Australia. One national judging system that grants the awards and supplies the basis for show judging, the magazine Orchids Australia, and a public awards database (opens in a new tab) — 7,622 awards on record on 12 September 2026, filterable by genus, by award and by state panel. The Council is also Australia’s point of contact for international orchid bodies and its liaison with government on CITES.
• The European Orchid Council (opens in a new tab) — Europe, and it judges nothing itself. What it does is accredit its members’ judging schemes (opens in a new tab), which is what lets a judge from one scheme sit at an EOC show or be invited to another member society’s event; a scheme needs a three-year training process, a written judging manual and a named contact who can verify a judge. Its member societies (opens in a new tab) include the RHS and the British Orchid Council, the Deutsche Orchideen-Gesellschaft, and national bodies in a dozen more countries. It runs a European Orchid Congress and Show roughly every three years.

Where names are settled

Three databases, and the difference between them is the thing worth learning once. Hybrids are the register’s business; species names are Kew’s, and Kew splits the job in two.

• Plants of the World Online (opens in a new tab) — taxonomy. Which name is currently accepted, what is a synonym of what, native range, descriptions and images; 1,450,000 plant names on 12 September 2026. Kew launched it in March 2017, and the RHS’s own registration page sends growers to Kew for the accepted names of plants in the wild.
• The International Plant Names Index (opens in a new tab) — nomenclature, which is a different question. The spelling, the author, the type, and the first place and date of publication of a name, under the botanical code; a collaboration between Kew, the Harvard University Herbaria and the Australian National Herbarium, updated daily. IPNI says it itself: for taxonomic data, go to Plants of the World Online.
• The International Orchid Register (opens in a new tab) — the hybrids, and nothing else. A grex name in, its parentage out; a pair of parents in, the grexes already made from them out. This is the register the hybrid pages on this site are built from.