Cultigen

[note 2] The ICNCP does not recognize the use of trade designations and other marketing devices as scientifically acceptable names; it does provide advice on how they should be presented.

Apart from ancient cultigens, there may be occasional anthropogenic plants, such as those that are the result of breeding, selection, and tissue grafting, that are considered of no commercial value and have therefore not been given names according to the ICNCP.

He created the term from the thought of a need for special categories for cultivated plants that had arisen by intentional human activity and which would not fit neatly into the Linnaean hierarchical classification of ranks used by the International Rules of Botanical Nomenclature (which later became the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants).

In his 1918 paper, Bailey noted that for anyone preparing a descriptive account of the cultivated plants of a region (he was at that time preparing such an account for North America), it would be clear that there are two gentes or kinds (Latin singular gens, plural gentes) of plants.

He called this second kind of plant a cultigen; the word was thought to be derived from the combination of the Latin cultus ('cultivated') and gens ('kind').

A cultigen is a plant or group of apparent specific rank, known only in cultivation, with no determined nativity, presumably having originated, in the form in which we know it, under domestication.

Examples are Cucurbita maxima, Phaseolus vulgaris, Zea mays.Botanical historian Alan Morton thought that wild and cultivated plants (cultigens) were of interest to the ancient Greek botanists (partly for religious reasons) and that the distinction was discussed in some detail by Theophrastus, the "Father of Botany".

Theophrastus accepted the view that it was human action, not divine intervention, that produced cultivated plants (cultigens) from wild plants, and he also "had an inkling of the limits of culturally induced (phenotypic) changes and of the importance of genetic constitution" (Historia Plantarum III, 2,2 and Causa Plantarum I, 9,3).

[13] In 1953, the first International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants was published, in which Bailey's term cultivar was introduced.