Cultivar - Origin of Term

Origin of Term

The origin of the term "cultivar" arises from the need to distinguish between wild plants and those with characteristics that have arisen in cultivation (what we now call cultigens). This distinction dates back to the Greek philosopher Theophrastus (370–285 BCE), the "Father of Botany", who was keenly aware of this difference. Botanical historian Alan Morton notes that Theophrastus in his Enquiry into Plants"had an inkling of the limits of culturally induced (phenotypic) changes and of the importance of genetic constitution" (Historia Plantarum III, 2,2 and Causa Plantarum I, 9,3).

The International Code of Botanical Nomenclature uses as its starting point for modern botanical nomenclature those Latin names that appeared in Linnaeus' publications Species Plantarum (10th ed.) and Genera Plantarum (5th ed.). In Species Plantarum, Linnaeus (1707–1778) listed all the plants known to him, either directly or from his extensive reading. He recognised the rank of varietas (in English this is the botanical "variety", a rank below that of species and subspecies) and he indicated these varieties by using letters of the Greek alphabet such as α, β, λ in front of the variety name, rather than using the abbreviation var., which is the current convention. Most of the varieties listed by Linnaeus were of "garden" origin rather than being wild plants.

Over time there was an increasing need to distinguish between plants growing in the wild, and those with variations that had been produced in cultivation. In the nineteenth century many "garden-derived" plants were given horticultural names, sometimes in Latin and sometimes in a local language. From about the 1900s, plants produced in cultivation in Europe were recognised in the Scandinavian, Germanic, and Slavic literature through the words stamm or sorte but these words could not be used internationally since, by international agreement, any new terms had to be based in Latin. In the twentieth century an improved international terminology was proposed for the classification and nomenclature of cultivated plants.

The word cultivar was coined in 1923 by Liberty Hyde Bailey of the Liberty Hyde Bailey Hortorium, Cornell University, New York State, when he wrote:

The cultigen is a species, or its equivalent, that has appeared under domestication – the plant is cultigenous. I now propose another name, cultivar, for a botanical variety, or for a race subordinate to species, that has originated under cultivation; it is not necessarily, however, referable to a recognized botanical species. It is essentially the equivalent of the botanical variety except in respect to its origin.

In this paper Bailey used only the rank of species for the cultigen but it was clear to him that many domesticated plants were more like botanical varieties than species, and that appears to have motivated the suggestion of the new classification category cultivar, which is generally assumed to be a contraction of the words cultivated and variety. However, Bailey was never explicit about the etymology of the word, and it has been suggested that it is a contraction of the words cultigen and variety, which seems more appropriate.

The new word cultivar was promoted as "euphonious" and that "it is free from ambiguity". It serves a purpose. Its use was subsequently recommended by the first Cultivated Plant Code, which was published in 1953, and by 1960 it had achieved wide international acceptance.