SPREADING THE WORD AND BRIDGING THE GAP

Many diverse groups of professionals from a wide range of backgrounds are in some way involved in activities connected with the raising of plants in cultivation. These include nurserymen and seeds merchants, landscape architects, those involved in cultivar testing and the granting of Plant Breeders’ Rights, patents and other Intellectual Property Rights, lawyers responsible for drafting or modifying national and international legislation, and of course botanists and horticulturists, some of whom are responsible for the international codes of nomenclature.
In some countries the protocols by which plants are released to the trade, and the names under which they are released, are closely controlled; in others, including Britain, the process is much looser. Against this background, in the late 1980s, the Horticultural Taxonomy Group (Hortax) was set up with the general aim of trying to improve accuracy in the names of plants in cultivation by drawing up proposals to make the Cultivated Plant Code more user-friendly, organising international symposia, and forming links with the statutory bodies involved in granting Plant Breeders’ Rights. With a view to reaching a wider audience, including students, nurserymen and gardeners, Hortax is now working on publications setting out as clearly and simply as possible the basic principles on which the names of cultivated plants are given and applied.