Cultigen - Origin of Term

Origin of Term

The word cultigen was coined in 1918 by Liberty Hyde Bailey (1858–1954) an American horticulturist, botanist and cofounder of the American Society for Horticultural Science. He was aware of the need for special categories for those cultivated plants that had arisen by intentional human activity and which would not fit neatly into the Linnaean hierarchical classification of ranks used by the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (Cultivated Plant Code).

In his 1918 paper Bailey noted that for anyone preparing a descriptive account of the cultivated plants of a country (he was at that time preparing such an account for North America) it would be clear that there are two gentes or kinds (Latin singular, gens; plural, gentes) of plants. Firstly, those that are of known origin or nativity "of known habitat". These he referred to as indigens. The other kind was:

" ... a domesticated group of which the origin may be unknown or indefinite, which has such characters as to separate it from known indigens, and which is probably not represented by any type specimen or exact description, having therefore no clear taxonomic beginning."

He called this second kind of plant a cultigen, the word derived from the conflation of the Latin cultus - cultivated, and gens - kind.

In 1923 Bailey extended his original discussion emphasising that he was dealing with plants at the rank of species and he referred to indigens as:

and cultigens as plants that:

" arise in some way under the hand of man "

He then defined a cultigen as:

"... a species, or its equivalent, that has appeared under domestication ..."