A cultivar is a plant that has been selected or bred by humans for specific desirable traits, then maintained through careful propagation. The word itself is a shortening of “cultivated variety,” which neatly captures the concept: unlike plants that evolve their characteristics in the wild, a cultivar exists because someone deliberately chose it for a particular color, flavor, size, disease resistance, or other quality worth preserving.
How Cultivars Differ From Botanical Varieties
The distinction between a cultivar and a botanical variety comes down to origin. A botanical variety develops naturally within a species. A population of wildflowers might produce individuals with white petals instead of purple, and if that trait breeds true generation after generation in the wild, botanists may classify it as a variety. Seedlings from a true botanical variety generally inherit the same distinguishing traits as their parent.
A cultivar, by contrast, is the result of human intervention. Someone noticed a plant with unusual or valuable characteristics, or deliberately crossed two plants to combine traits, and then worked to keep those characteristics stable. Because cultivars often carry complex genetic combinations that wouldn’t persist on their own, their seedlings frequently look nothing like the parent plant. That’s why most cultivars can’t simply be grown from seed the way natural varieties can.
You can spot the difference in how they’re written. Botanical varieties appear in lowercase italics after “var.” in a plant’s scientific name. Cultivar names are capitalized and placed in single quotes. A plant like Cornus florida var. rubra ‘Cherokee Chief’ actually has both: it belongs to a naturally occurring red-flowered variety of flowering dogwood, and ‘Cherokee Chief’ is a specific cultivar selected from within that variety.
Where Cultivars Come From
Cultivars arise through a few different paths. The most straightforward is simple selection: a grower notices one plant in a field or garden that performs better, tastes different, or looks more striking than the rest, and begins propagating it. Many heirloom tomato cultivars started this way, with farmers saving material from their best-performing plants year after year.
Hybridization is another common route. Breeders deliberately cross two parent plants to combine desirable traits from each. The offspring are evaluated, and the best performers are selected and stabilized as new cultivars. This technique drives much of modern agriculture, from disease-resistant wheat to longer-lasting cut roses.
Some cultivars originate from spontaneous mutations, sometimes called “sports.” A single branch on an apple tree might produce fruit with a different skin color, or a shrub might throw out a shoot with variegated leaves. If a grower catches this mutation and propagates it, a new cultivar is born. Breeders can also induce mutations deliberately using chemicals or radiation to generate genetic variation they can then screen for useful traits.
Why Most Cultivars Need Cloning
When you plant a seed from a ‘Honeycrisp’ apple, you won’t get another ‘Honeycrisp’ tree. You’ll get something unpredictable, likely inferior, because the genetic shuffle of sexual reproduction breaks apart the precise combination of traits that made ‘Honeycrisp’ worth naming in the first place. This is true for the vast majority of cultivars: their value lies in a specific genetic package that seed reproduction scrambles.
To keep a cultivar identical from one generation to the next, growers use vegetative propagation, essentially cloning the plant. Cuttings, grafting, division, and tissue culture all produce new plants that are genetic copies of the original. This approach locks in favorable trait combinations, specific chemical compositions (think flavor compounds in fruit), and even hybrid vigor that would otherwise be lost. It also allows growers to multiply plants that are partially or fully sterile and could never reproduce by seed at all.
The tradeoff is that a field full of genetically identical clones shares the same vulnerabilities. A disease that can attack one plant can sweep through all of them. Research on cultivar mixtures, where farmers plant several cultivars of the same crop together, shows about a 2.2% average yield increase over single-cultivar plantings. The benefit grows larger under disease pressure or poor soil conditions, and these mixed plantings show more stable yields from year to year in the face of weather variability.
Where Cultivars Fit in Plant Classification
Standard biological classification moves from broad to narrow: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Below the species level, botanists recognize naturally occurring subdivisions like subspecies, variety, and form. The cultivar sits outside this natural hierarchy entirely. It’s a horticultural and agricultural designation, not a taxonomic rank assigned by nature. A cultivar can exist within a species, within a botanical variety, or even span a cross between two species (in the case of interspecific hybrids).
Legal Protection for New Cultivars
Developing a new cultivar can take years or decades of breeding and testing, so legal frameworks exist to protect that investment. In the United States, the Plant Variety Protection Act allows breeders to secure exclusive rights to a new cultivar if it meets three criteria.
- Distinct: The cultivar must be measurably different from every known existing variety at the time of application.
- Uniform: Individual plants of the cultivar must look and perform consistently enough that any variation is predictable and commercially acceptable.
- Stable: The cultivar must remain true to its description over successive generations, so future propagated plants match the original.
These requirements, often abbreviated as DUS, ensure that a protected cultivar is a genuinely reproducible product, not just a one-off lucky plant. Protection typically lasts 20 to 25 years depending on the crop, during which the breeder controls who can sell or propagate the cultivar. Some cultivars are also patented, which carries even stricter restrictions: propagating a patented cultivar without permission, even for personal use, can be a legal violation.
Everyday Examples
Cultivars are everywhere, even if the term isn’t familiar. Every named apple variety you see at the grocery store, ‘Gala,’ ‘Fuji,’ ‘Granny Smith,’ is a cultivar maintained through grafting. The same goes for most roses, blueberries, and grapes. In ornamental gardening, cultivars account for the vast majority of plants sold at nurseries: that particular shade of purple coneflower or compact boxwood you picked out is almost certainly a named cultivar selected for traits that wouldn’t reliably reproduce from seed.
In agriculture, cultivar development has been one of the primary drivers of increased crop yields over the past century. Modern wheat, rice, corn, and soybean cultivars are bred for higher productivity, pest resistance, drought tolerance, and harvest efficiency. The process is continuous: as growing conditions change and new pest pressures emerge, breeders develop new cultivars to meet those challenges.