Can anyone tell me if the society is publishing cultivar registrations in Acer (as the ISHS mentions) and where to find them? I'm not a member but one member told me he had not seen any. The Open Registration Of Cultivars (OROC) project recently published 87 new Acer cultivars with sources. We don't want to duplicate the efforts of others if the work is complete enough and 100% free to the public. http://members.tripod.com/~Hatch_L/orocwoodyag.pdf Larry Hatch
Hi Larry, The Maple Society is in charge of registering new cultivars, and there has been some work involved with straightening out the situation. The role was previously held by Peter Gregory previously as a committee member. I'm not the right contact point for this subject, but I will PM you an email contact who should be able to fill you in more. I do believe that currently for a cultivar to be officially registered with the ICRA it application needs to be made to us. May I ask what criteria you're using for including a cultivar in your list? cheers, -Emery
Thanks for the help. ICRA/ISHS is a self-appointed body with no legal or governmental authority like a patent, trademark, or PBR
oroc (or see cultivar.org) has the OROC guidelines including our trademark policy. We have three graduate-trained taxonomists and given that less than 2% of woody plant and 1% of hardy perennial cultivars are being registered by the "authorities", our project was created by scientific, industry, and educational experts to remedy the situation. OROC data is free to use by any author with citation of the source. Your "sent to us" was interesting since most of the ICRA proactively seek out names and include them whether they are submitted or not. Proactive listings are absolutely necessary for any register to have depth and value and I know three ICRA that agree with us.
Well as I said, I'm not the contact person here, so it would be an error to read anything into my exact wording on this forum. As a proponent of Open Science I certainly have to approve of your efforts, but am I correct in gathering that access to the cultivar data base is a paid service? I wanted to look at the complete maple cultivar list to see what you had, I think I encountered a pay gate. Can't say for sure if I was looking in the right place though, since you seem to say above the data is free to use. Anyway it certainly looks as though you're doing important work. Maple cultivars are a thorny problem, in part because there are so many new ones all the time, as I'm sure you understand. Our most recent foray, "World Checklist of Maple Cultivar Names" (Peter Gregory and Hugh Angus) is now 10 years old, and contains over 3800 cultivars. Since that time there have been many thousand introduced. Of course I agree with your point about being proactive and Peter and Hugh certainly were. We have been discussing this lately at a recent symposium, and are taking steps to address publishing new cultivar information. As I understand it the preliminary plan is to put everything up and freely available, but I can't say how far along the process is. Since we're all volunteers it can take a while. Of course we work with the leading maple authorities in the world, like Piet de Jong, Koen Camelbeke, Dan Crowley, Cor van Gelderen, and many more, who were all involved in our recent discussions. -E
