About Cultivar Registration

The International Society of Horticultural Science is the governing body for cultivar registration carried out by appointed International Cultivar Registration Authorities (ICRA). The primary purpose for plant registration is to give a unique label to a plant within a genus, or for cultivated plants, more properly a denomination class. Without a unique label or name, gardeners, landscape designers, plant propagators, nurseries, garden centres, and others, are at a loss with respect to communicating plant identities in commerce or for discussion.

This concept has parallels with the naming of plants in botanical taxonomy in that a properly established name is the one used throughout the world, irrespective of language. In taxonomy, Latin is the universal language, but in cultivated plants the established name is rendered in the language of origin and is never to be translated. When the language of origin uses an alphabet different from that of the end user, transliteration, which replaces a letter in one alphabet with the corresponding equivalent in another is used. Written languages employing ideographic characters are transcripted into words using the Roman alphabet. Think of transcription as expressing the verbal sound in an alphabet understandable to us, or as it's sometimes described, as "spell sound."

At its most basic, cultivar registration attempts to ensure one name for any particular cultivar so that everybody knows what to expect when a named plant is being discussed for whatever purpose. The process of naming cultivated plants is outlined in the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants which is available from the International Society of Horticultural Science. There is also summary information about registration available at http://www.ishs.org/icra/index.htm.