Talk:Variety (botany)

Brown Caiman
The brown caiman is in excellent zoological fashion a subspecies. as such it is a bad example for explaining the term variety. Furthermore a subspecies has three parts to its name hence it is a trinominal.


 * Excellent. Thank you! Peak 16:45, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Confused
From the article:


 * A variety is a recognised division of a species in botany, next below the rank of subspecies; in zoology, species are only divided into subspecies and never into varieties.

Why is this? Then it goes on to say:


 * A domesticated variety of a plant is called a cultivar, while a domesticated variety of an animal is called a breed.

This contradicts the earlier sentence. Are there animal varieties or not? There certainly are breeds, and breeds can hardly be considered subspecies--poodles and Rottweilers are both Canis familiaris if I recall correctly, and can certainly produce Canis familiaris mixed-breed offspring, although they might need mechanical assistance to do so. 130.91.65.76 18:00, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Merge
As I understand it (just based on these articles, not on any additional reading), the question is whether to merge Variety (botany) (about scientific nomenclature) and Variety (plant) (about a legal term). Variety (biology) is already a redirect to the botany one. I could see arguments for describing both on the same page (mainly, that it might make it easier to contrast the two meanings), but on the whole I would think separate articles are more graceful. In particular, it lets aother articles link to one or the other, depending on which meaning they intend. Kingdon 01:29, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Agreed (also based on no additional knowledge), but maybe Variety (plant) should be renamed to Variety (horticulture). &mdash;JerryFriedman 17:52, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Yeah, or maybe Variety (plant) should be combined with Plant breeders' rights and/or International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants. Anyway, given that the merge tags for Variety (botany) and Variety (plant) had been there for three months, and this was all the discussion we got on the merge, it seems best to remove the tags (which I have gone ahead and done). What little input we have gotten seems to be against that particular merge. Kingdon 21:53, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

Scope For Improvement
I was rather hoping this page would explain how a variety is produced. Saying it is a rank below that of species is fine as far as it goes, but what about an explanation of how different the child has to be before it can be termed a variety. If I take two varieties of apple and pollinate one with the other and grow seedlings from the fruit produced, is this a variety by definition or is there some metric that determines it is not unless it is sufficiently optically distinct from either of its parents?  Cottonshirt  τ   07:50, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

Proposed merge
I propose to merge Plant variety here, because it seems to me that the primary meaning of the term has to do with the variety of plants; even though this may be a technical term in botany, the nuances of it would best be explained in this article. bd2412 T 04:44, 3 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Oppose – Plant variety is currently a disambiguation page. Although I would generally like to see the scholarly use of any term predominate, I have to disagree that in this case it is the prevailing usage. Misuse of the term to mean cultivar (or occasionally forma) is, I think, much more common, and Plant variety (law) is a component of intellectual-property law that occasionally attracts considerable journalistic interest (it isn't well covered here yet). Sminthopsis84 (talk) 20:14, 3 May 2013 (UTC)
 * I understand where you are coming from, but it is not as though there are several distinct and unrelated concepts that are ambiguous to one another (like the planet Mercury, the element Mercury, and the god Mercury). Instead what we have here is a rather murky divide between unclear delineations of ways that types of plants are divided up. There is, for example, no use of the term "plant variety" to delineate different kinds of power plants or different kinds of skateboard foot-planting moves. In fact, the "Other nomenclature uses" already in this article covers all the topics listed on the disambiguation page. Why have that duplication? bd2412  T 00:01, 4 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Perhaps the corrections that User:Squids and Chips has just made have clarified the delineations? Sminthopsis84 (talk) 12:31, 4 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Perhaps, but those delineations are making Plant variety look more like an article on terminology, and less like a disambiguation page. bd2412  T 16:01, 2 June 2013 (UTC)

Move
(See also WT:PLANTS.) The page was recently moved to "Botanical variety" without discussion on the grounds of natural disambiguation (WP:NATURALDIS). I don't accept that there is anything "natural" about "botanical variety" as a title for an article about the taxonomic rank of varietas/variety as used in the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants (ICN). "Botanical variety" to me naturally means the variety of plants, or else is ambiguous between the ICN rank of "varietas" and the ICNCP rank of "cultivar". So I've moved the article back, pending discussion and consensus here. Peter coxhead (talk) 06:21, 23 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Agree. If someone uses the expression "botanical variety" to mean a particular category, rather than to mean the broad spectrum of plant life, then they are possibly trying to state that they don't mean the definition in law (which has little to do with botany). Plant variety is another option that fully disambiguates, but perhaps it is not as good as the original link that you have now restored. Sminthopsis84 (talk) 13:06, 23 June 2016 (UTC)