APPLICATION AND REVISION OF ICNCP-1995: ISSUES AND SUGGESTIONS, ESPECIALLY FROM A CHINESE PERSPECTIVE

The wide acceptance of the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants (ICNCP) depends on its rules being truly international and applicable to as many countries and languages as possible, and being precise and user-friendly. In the case of the Chinese language, forbidding the inclusion of the common or vernacular name of a genus, nothogenus or species as the final part of a Chinese cultivar epithet may render the cultivar epithet linguistically awkward, and so this rule should be modified. Since in French (and in many other Romance languages) adjectives usually come after the substantive they modify, the Code does not seem fair to stipulate that English names such as Camellia ‘Perfect Rose’ could not be established after 1995, while the equivalent French names such as Camellia ‘Rose Parfaite’ are still perfectly establishable. Naming cultivars with numerals or arbitrary sequences of letters (which are not words) should be allowed (though not recommended), and this should be clearly stated, since such names are fairly common, as can be seen in the examples in the Code. The limit on the length of cultivar-group epithets should be brought in line with that for cultivar epithets, instead of being based on number of words. The Code should provide for the formation of a “species” epithet in Latin form for all distinct graft-chimaeras that arise from the same component species belonging to the same genus or different genera, to distinguish them from graft-chimaeras that arise from other component species of the genus or genera. These and other issues that may or may not find easy solutions are presented for discussion.