What Does Cultivar Mean in Plants?

The word cultivar means a cultivated variety; thus, a cultivar is selected and cultivated by humans. Although some cultivars can occur in nature as plant mutations, most cultivars are developed by plant breeders and are called hybrids.

What is a cultivar in plant breeding?

A cultivar is a subspecies classification describing plants varieties which are produced through artificial selection. Cultivar, the word, comes from a combination of cultivated variety. Different forms of the same species are considered varieties.

How do you make a cultivar?

The techniques used in creating a new cultivar are: mass selection, recurrent selection, top crossing, and synthetic variety development. In mass selection, the source population is examined and desirable plants or seed from those parent plants are selected.