Cultivar, hybrid, and clone: plant naming explained
Three words collectors use constantly, and often interchangeably. Here is what cultivar, hybrid, and clone actually mean, and how to record them.
Plant names carry more information than they first appear to. The words cultivar, hybrid, and clone are often used loosely, even interchangeably, but each describes something specific about where a plant came from and how it was produced. Getting them straight makes your records sharper and your conversations with other growers a lot clearer.
Start with the botanical name
Almost every plant has a two-part botanical name: a genus and a species, both italic, with the genus capitalised and the species lowercase, for example Acer palmatum, the Japanese maple. This binomial is governed by the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants. It is the stable scientific identity everything else hangs from.
Below species, botanists sometimes recognise a naturally occurring variety (abbreviated var.) or form (f.), wild variations, written in italics, e.g. Acer palmatum var. matsumurae. These differ from cultivars, which is where confusion usually starts.
Cultivar: a cultivated variety
A cultivar, the word contracts "cultivated variety", is a plant selected and maintained by people for desirable traits: a particular leaf colour, habit, flower, or hardiness. Cultivar names follow a separate rulebook, the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants. The name is written in single quotes, capitalised, and never italicised: Acer palmatum 'Bloodgood', Hosta 'Sum and Substance'.
The key requirement is that a cultivar stays distinct, uniform, and stable when propagated. If 'Bloodgood' stopped coming true, if anything and everything got labelled 'Bloodgood', the name would be meaningless. That leads straight to the next term.
Clone: genetically identical copies
A clone is a group of plants propagated vegetatively from a single parent, by cuttings, division, grafting, or tissue culture, so every plant is genetically identical to the original. Most woody and perennial cultivars are maintained as clones, because that is the only reliable way to keep them true to type.
So 'Bloodgood' is both a cultivar (a named selection) and a clone (every 'Bloodgood' traces back by cuttings or grafts to one original tree). The two words describe the same plants from different angles: cultivar is about the name and the selection; clone is about the propagation and the genetics. Not every cultivar is a single clone, some are seed-raised strains selected to come reasonably true, but in collector plants, the two very often point to the same lineage.
Hybrid: a cross between two parents
A hybrid is the offspring of a cross between two different species, or two different taxa more generally. Hybrids are marked with a multiplication sign: an interspecific hybrid within a genus is written like Magnolia × soulangeana, and a hybrid genus (a cross between genera) takes a × in front, like × Fatshedera.
In some groups, the offspring of a particular cross are given a collective grex name, standard practice in orchids, where one registered grex covers all the seedlings of a cross. A hybrid can then carry a cultivar name too: the best individual seedling is selected, quoted, and propagated as a clone.
How the terms fit together
It helps to read them as answers to different questions:
- Hybrid answers how was it bred? By crossing two parents.
- Cultivar answers what selection is it? A named, distinct variety.
- Clone answers how was it propagated? Vegetatively, as identical copies.
A single plant can be all three at once: a hybrid by origin, a cultivar by name, and a clone by propagation. 'Bloodgood' is a cultivar and a clone but not a hybrid. A wild-collected Acer palmatum seedling is none of them, it is just the species.
One more wrinkle: trade names and trademarks
Modern nursery plants often carry a flashy trade name or trademark that is not the true cultivar name. Roses are the classic case: a rose sold under a memorable marketing name is usually registered under a coded cultivar name, the real, internationally recognised identity. For records that hold up over time, note both: the selling name you will recognise and the cultivar name that uniquely identifies the plant.
Recording it well
When you catalogue a plant, capture the full identity in separate fields rather than mashing it into one line:
- Genus and species (the botanical name)
- Cultivar name, in quotes, if it has one
- Whether it is a hybrid, and the parentage if known
- Any trade name or trademark it is sold under
Structured this way, your collection stays searchable and unambiguous, you can find every cultivar of a species, or every plant of a given parentage, in seconds. That is the principle behind Leafolio's plant collection tracker: a place for the botanical name, the cultivar, and the source, so each plant is named as precisely as you care to make it.