Re: Zantedeschia

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Susan,

 

The Koninklijke Algemeene Vereniging voor Bloembollencultuur (KAVB) is the International Registration Authority for Zantedeschia. I have not tried to track their list down on the site, so don’t know if they have been more successful that I have in trying to get the rest of the family’s cultivars tracked down.

 

By the way there is nothing hard about “hybrid” – the product of crossing two related but not identical plants, and “cultivar” – a single plant that was considered different enough to be worth slapping a name onto, having tested to see that it comes true when propagated by any method except seed. These are pretty sloppy definitions that I will not go to court over, but not too bad. The cultivar name is only “registered”  when it has gone through the process of appearing in a dated print publication with a description, without that it is really only a trade name or a label name ( no one can stop you calling a plant growing in your garden by whatever name you please, but it becomes a little more iffy when it is offered commercially under a name that has not be “legitimised” [can’t think of a better word] by registration.  The fairly small nuisance of registering the name, and of the fact that it doesn’t give any protection except if the industry is willing to do it to “police” itself, may be the reason that I have not been able to sell the idea of cultivar registration to the aroid community, much to my chagrin.

 

Derek