A Curator's Viewpoint

Abstract

Longwood Gardens, Inc., is a not-for-profit display garden open to the public, with ≈800,000 visitors per year. The plant collections are comprised of >11,000 taxa, and the majority of plants in public display areas have labels providing common name, scientific name, and cultivar if applicable. My responsibilities include the identification, naming, and labeling of all plants at the gardens. Determination of species names of plants is a straightforward undertaking in most cases. Identification and nomenclatural verification of cultivars that make up nearly 60% of our new accessions are much more problematic. This work is rapidly becoming more difficult as a result of the recent practice of using trademark names. Unless some compromise is reached, this practice will undermine the basis of our system of horticultural nomenclature. An understanding of the problem requires knowledge of the horticultural code and patent and trademark regulations. The International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants [ICNCP] (Brickell, 1980) is produced and updated periodically by the International Commission for the Nomenclature of Cultivated Plants of the International Union for Biological Sciences. Having no force of law, the code is essentially a “gentleman’s agreement”, the primary aim of which is “to promote uniformity, accuracy, and fixity in the naming of agricultural, horticultural, and silvicultural cultivars (varieties). . .” [article 3]. The code also states: “Each cultivar has one correct cultivar name, the single name by which it is internationally known” [article 35]; “Registration of cultivar (variety) names is of the greatest importance for nomenclatural stability” [article 4]; “Registration is the acceptance of a cultivar name by a cultivar registration authority and the inclusion of this name in a register” [article 53]; and “A cultivar name must be freely available for use by any person to denote the cultivar (variety) whose name it is. A cultivar name cannot, in general, be registered as a trademark” [article 3]. Since 1 Jan. 1959, cultivar names must be “fancy names”, not botanical names in Latin form [article 27], and should not be “composed of abbreviations, numerals or arbitrary sequences of letters. . .” [recommendation 31A]. Although these are all commendable goals, on a worldwide basis they are often impractical and ignored.