Cultivar

The word is a twentieth-century coinage, coined in 1923 by the American botanist Liberty Hyde Bailey, who blended two Latin roots to create a precise technical term: cultus, from colere, "to cultivate," and varietas, "variety." Bailey needed a word that was distinct from "variety" in the botanical sense — which referred to naturally occurring variation within a species — to describe variation that had been deliberately selected and maintained by human cultivation. A cultivar is a plant variety that originated in cultivation and is maintained only by continued human intervention.

The distinction Bailey was drawing matters practically. A wild strawberry varies in its offspring — each seedling differs from its parent. But a cultivar like 'Cambridge Favourite' strawberry is reproduced vegetatively, each new plant a genetic clone of the original selection. The cultivar name, always placed in single quotation marks by horticultural convention, refers not to a type but to a specific genetic individual and all its vegetative descendants. When a nurseryman sells 'Peace' roses, every one is a cutting of a cutting of a cutting of the original plant selected by Francis Meilland in France in the late 1930s.

The International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants governs how cultivars are named and registered. A new cultivar name must be in a modern language (not Latin, to distinguish it from botanical variety names), must not have been used before for the same species, and must be registered with the appropriate authority. The naming of a cultivar is thus a formal act — a claim that this particular selection is stable, distinct, and worth preserving. Behind each registered name is a human judgment that something worth keeping has been found.

The cultivar system underlies the entire structure of commercial horticulture. When a seed company offers twenty varieties of tomato, each with a distinct name, they are offering twenty cultivars, each with documented performance characteristics. The heritage seed movement that resists this — preserving old cultivars like 'Mortgage Lifter' tomato or 'Cox's Orange Pippin' apple — is itself working within the cultivar framework, arguing that certain old selections deserve continued cultivation just as much as any modern hybrid.