A cultivar is a group of cultivated plants selected for particular characteristics and able to keep those characteristics when propagated by defined means. The word, a contraction of "cultivated variety", is governed by the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants (ICNCP), which treats a cultivar as the basic unit of classification for plants in cultivation and requires it to be distinct from other cultivars, uniform in its selected traits and stable, so that those traits persist through the propagation used to maintain it. A cultivar name pairs the botanical name with a cultivar epithet, as in Cannabis 'Finola'.
In Cannabis the cultivar sits among several overlapping ways of naming plant groups that are often confused. It differs from a landrace, a locally adapted population maintained by farmers without formal selection; from a botanical variety, a rank of the wild-plant nomenclatural code applied to naturally occurring forms; from the vernacular strain, a market term with no standing in either code; and from a chemovar, a grouping by measured cannabinoid and terpene chemistry rather than by breeding history. … read more →
