Talk:Variety (botany)

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	Variety (botany) is within the scope of WikiProject Plants, an attempt to better organize information in articles related to plants and botany. For more information, visit the project page.
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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)

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)

[edit] 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). —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)