Modern science and technology has made it easy to produce beautiful and/or disease resistant flowering plants through hybridization. In the American Heritage Dictionary, a hybrid is defined as "of mixed origin or composition; cross-breed". Orchid hybridization is commercially achieved through hand-pollination.  Artificial hybrid orchids are common between species in the same genus or between species of different genera in the same sub-tribe. The hybrids produce showy colorful orchids. Since they can be cultivated in the laboratory as well as in the greenhouse, many new  hybrids have been generated by both hobbyists and commercial orchid farms.  Due to increased production, the larger public can now enjoy beautiful hybridized orchids, a pleasure formerly accorded to only a privileged few.

In my garden, I grow many colorful flowers which make good photographic subjects, and also attract butterflies.  Yellow, red, blue, and purple are my favorite colors.  For many years, the blue Irises in my garden reliably produced beautiful purplish blue flowers every spring. Two years ago, my colleague Linda gave me a few white-flowered Iris plants which I planted near my blue Irises.  As expected, my two sets of plants produced either beautiful pure white or pure blue blossoms that first spring.  However the following year, the pure white Iris flowers disappeared from my garden. Instead, there were hybrids with beautiful mixed white-blue flowers. These hybrid white-blue Iris flowers resulted from natural cross-pollination between the neighboring blue-flowered and white-flowered plants. My hybrids were not artificially created by hand-pollination, but rather by the natural forces of wind, bees, and insects.