What’s in a Plant Name? How Cultivar and Trade Designations Shape the Rose Garden

What’s in a Plant Name? How Cultivar and Trade Designations Shape the Rose Garden

By Alex Henderson, Curator of Living Collections, Royal Botanical Gardens

Rosa ‘AUSorts’ is one of the most striking and better-performing English roses planted in RBG’s Rose Garden. Hybridized by David C. H. Austin, it is an impressive shrub rose with light pink flowers and a pleasing fragrance reminiscent of citrus and myrrh. Large, enticing bloom clusters flower in flushes throughout the season and don’t disappoint. It was introduced in the UK in 2002 and registered as the cultivar ‘AUSsorts’.

Cultivar names (literally derived from cultivated variety) are given to denote variations of plant species that result from deliberate hybridization in cultivation or that may arise by chance as seedlings in the wild. To distinguish these from scientific names, they are not printed in italics (such as genus or species names) and are enclosed in single quotation marks. The use of cultivar names is strictly governed by the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants (ICNCP) and may be registered with an International Cultivar Registration Authority (ICRA).

As a cultivar name, ‘AUSorts’ is somewhat unpronounceable, resembling a code. In this case, the name indicates the plant’s origin, with the first three uppercase letters identifying David Austin as the hybridizer. Many modern roses have similarly undistinguished cultivar names that are equally unexciting.

To mitigate the cultivar conundrum, rose hybridizers apply a trade designation—essentially a selling name—used to market a plant when the cultivar name is considered unsuitable for sales purposes. These trade designations may also be registered as trademarks and legally protected, so sellers can only sell plants under the trade designations with permission from the trademark owner.

The hybridizer has sole legal rights to the trade designation, and as these are often more attractive and easily remembered, they offer significant sales advantages. To make things more complicated, trade designations are not governed by the ICNCP, but they must be styled in a different typeface, conventionally in small capitals, without single quotation marks.

On introduction in 2002, the trade designation given to Rosa ‘AUSsorts’ was Mortimer Sackler. Mortimer Sackler was an American psychiatrist, entrepreneur, and co-owner of Purdue Pharma, now known for the drug Oxycontin. Several US states have filed lawsuits against Purdue Pharma for their role in the modern opioid crisis.

Sackler’s philanthropic activities included donating millions of dollars in grants to educational, artistic, and cultural institutions. However, in recent years, many of these institutions have removed the name from their buildings, including Yale University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the University of Oxford, the British Museum, and the Louvre, amongst others.

Following suit, David Austin Roses announced in 2022 that the rose was to be given the new trade designation Mary Delany. The new name for this rose is now Rosa ‘AUSsorts’ MARY DELANY.

Mary Delany (1700–1788) was a talented and forward-thinking 18th-century English artist, gardener, and writer, known for her invention of “decoupage” or paper cutting, also known as “paper mosaiks.” Such was her reputation that George III granted Delany a house at Windsor, complete with a generous pension until the end of her life. Upon her death, her memorial described her as “a lady of singular ingenuity and politeness.”

The change in trade designation from Mortimer Sackler, now considered a controversial figure, to that of Mary Delany, a respected artist, is clearly a more wholesome and superior choice for a marketing campaign.

So, what’s in a plant name? A lot more than you think!