📷 Damien Wallace / iNaturalist (CC BY 4.0)
The Market
Understory

F1, F2 and Selfing: What Hybrid Generation Labels Really Mean for What You're Buying

Three letters on a listing carry a surprising amount of weight — and a fair amount of fog.

The listing is short and the photo is good: Anthurium papillilaminum × dressleri, F2, $475, shipping Monday. You've been watching this seller for a year. You know the parent cross. You hover on the buy button and then stop on those two characters — F2 — and wonder, with the small private dread of someone who has been burned before, what they actually promise.

The aroid market runs on shorthand. F1, F2, BC, sib, selfed, IBE, RBE — abbreviations borrowed half from formal plant breeding and half from the hobbyist forums of the late 2000s, where growers traded seed and tried to sound rigorous. The labels matter. They also mislead. A serious buyer should know what each one means in textbook terms, what it tends to mean in practice on a Tuesday-night Instagram drop, and where the gap between those two definitions can cost you several hundred dollars.

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