About Cultivar Name Establishment

It is important to be aware that if a cultivar is released without its chosen name being formally established, it may be open to someone else to establish a different name for it, or, conversely, the same name may be established by someone else for a different cultivar. Either way, you may well lose the name you chose for your plant, if it hasn’t been established.

Cultivar Names are established (i.e. fixed in perpetuity) by publishing them in a dated hard copy publication with some descriptive information about the cultivar. BGI will accept your cultivar name submissions, provided the name is in accordance with the provisions of the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants, and publish them 2 times yearly in our newsletter, The BGI Herald. This publication is mailed to a selection of botanical libraries around the world, and is available free to anyone, in digital form, from our site here. The form for submitting your Brugmansia cultivar names for publication in The Herald is located here, and Datura cultivar names can be submitted here.

If you are unsure whether your chosen name is in accordance with the Code, we can advise you. The commonest mistake is to choose a name which is so similar to an existing one within Datura or Brugmansia that confusion may arise. In such cases the new name will need to be modified to make it more distinctive, or changed altogether.

Datura and Brugmansia are what are called different denomination classes, meaning that cultivar names within one are treated quite independently from those in the other: to illustrate, the names Brugmansia ‘Golden Queen’ and Datura ‘Golden Queen’ may coexist because they are in different denomination classes. On the other hand, Brugmansia ‘Sara’ and Brugmansia ‘Sarah’ may not coexist, because they are confusingly similar and within the same denomination class, Brugmansia. It is therefore very advisable to scan our database to ensure that a proposed new name is not very similar to another already in existence. You can do that here. Equally, we can advise you.

Although BGI is the ICRA for Brugmansia and Datura, cultivar names in these groups do not have to be established by us. New names can be submitted to other interest groups which provide this service, or the names can be established in, for example, a horticultural magazine article, a nursery catalog, or a book, provided the publication is in hard copy, is dated, and is intended to be permanent. Publishing a new cultivar name on a website or in some other electronic medium is currently insufficient to establish it. We routinely scan elsewhere in the public domain for new names, establish them when necessary, and incorporate them into our Brugmansia Register (database) and our Datura Register.