What Is a Cultivar? Cultivar vs Hybrid Explained
If you've spent any time browsing succulent and cactus platforms including ours, you must have run into names/tags like Gasteraloe 'Thais', Agave 'Snow Glow', or × Mangave 'Red Wing’ and simply told yourself that you can never really make much sense out of how the names are written for plants. All your life you just knew the Latin people were really into putting names to plants and that’s why the plants have Latin names!! :D Turns out, every quote mark, italic, and little × in a plant name is meant for a specific reason. Once you know the structure, plant labels stop looking like decoration and start reading like a short biography of the plant.
We will try to untangle two terms people use interchangeably but which mean genuinely different things: hybrid and cultivar.
Cultivar vs Hybrid: What Makes a Hybrid
describes parentage. A plant born from crossing two different species, or even two different genera.
Cultivar describes identity. A specific, named plant (or a clone of it) that's deliberately maintained and propagated because of some feature/trait worth keeping.
Interestingly a plant can be both. In fact, most named succulent hybrids you'll ever buy are cultivars. The hybrid cross created the plant, and the cultivar name is what lets you (and the nursery, and the next buyer) refer to that exact plant, generation after generation for all times to come.
Cultivar vs Hybrid: What Makes a Hybrid
A hybrid is the offspring of two different parent taxa which means two species within the same genus (an interspecific hybrid), or two entirely different genera (an intergeneric hybrid). This isn't just a rosette-succulent thing because it shows up across almost every category we deal in, from soft leaf succulents to hard leaf succulents to cacti
Echeveria × Sedum → × Sedeveria
Echeveria × Graptopetalum → × Graptoveria
Graptopetalum × Sedum → × Graptosedum
Aloe × Gasteria → × Gasteraloe
Aloe x Haworthia → × Alworthia
Huernia x Orbea → × Huerorbea
Agave × Manfreda → × Mangave (technically outdated now that Manfreda has been included in Agave botanically, but still the name the entire nursery trade uses)
Sansevieria hybrids (numerous named crosses within the genus, sold simply as “Sansevieria hybrid” followed by a cultivar name)
Cactus genera hybridize too, though less often marketed as formal intergeneric.
One interesting thing: a hybrid name doesn't refer to one specific plant. It refers to any and all offspring of that particular cross, no matter how much individual seedlings vary in color, form, or size. That's precisely the problem a cultivar name solves.
Cultivar vs Hybrid: What Makes a Cultivar
“Cultivar” is short for cultivated variety representing a plant selected and maintained by people because of a particular feature/trait (color, shape, growth habit, variegation) that's worth preserving. Importantly one must always remember that a cultivar name will always point to one specific clone – displaying one specific feature/trait and is propagated vegetatively (offsets, cuttings, division, tissue culture) so every plant carrying that name is genetically identical to the original with that specific feature/trait. This is why a cultivar name, unlike a hybrid formula, can attach to one exact plant — because it's not describing a cross, it's tagging a clone with a specific feature/trait.
The rules for writing cultivar names come from the ICNCP: International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants. It has formed a few rules around naming of cultivars:
The cultivar name goes in single quotation marks
The genus name (and species name, if it is at all included) stays italicized as usual but the cultivar name itself is never italicized.
The cultivar name is capitalized, but is not a Latin word or phrase. The cultivar name is in a simple language, so that it sounds more like a product name than a scientific name. That's why you see things like 'Black Prince' or ‘Red Devil’ rather than invented Latin-sounding words.
No hybrid symbol (×) ever appears next to a cultivar name. The × marks a cross; the cultivar name marks a specific clone descended from (possibly) that cross.
A cultivar of hybrid origin is written with the cultivar name directly after the genus name. The species name is dropped altogether, because the plant may not cleanly belong to only one species anymore. Like × Gasteraloe 'Green Ice' and Gasteraloe 'Green Ice'
Keep it concise. The Code caps a cultivar name at 10 syllables and 30 characters (not counting spaces or the quote marks), and it cannot be a single letter or purely a number.
Trade names and cultivar names are not the same thing. A “selling name” or “marketing name” (what the ICNCP calls a trade designation) is not placed in single quotes, because it isn't the actual registered cultivar name and it's used only for sales. So the plant might have a trade name is various countries even though the origin is the same.
However, the ICNCP rules are not really easy to follow unless you really are the type of a grower that wants everything perfectly managed. But interestingly, we are all plant lovers first and name nerds later! :P
Examples from our own catalog
Gasteraloe 'Thais' (succulent, intergeneric hybrid)
Gasteraloe is the intergeneric hybrid genus and a cross between Aloe and Gasteria. Written formally, it'd be × Gasteraloe, though the × is very commonly dropped in everyday nursery use once the hybrid genus name is well established.
'Thais' is the cultivar name that is specific, named clone within that hybrid genus, propagated vegetatively rather than grown from seed.
No italics on 'Thais'. Single quotes, not double. Also, no × sitting next to the cultivar name.
“Sansevieria hybrid” here is telling that this isn't a wild species, without spelling out the exact cross (common in the trade when parentage is complex or simply undocumented).
'Silver Boncel' is the actual cultivar name unitalicized.
And time for some quirks - Sansevieria has been formally absorbed into Dracaena by botanists in recent years, but almost the entire trade, including us, still sells and labels under the older, far more recognizable Sansevieria. This is a good example of how trade convention and strict current botany don't always move in sync, and that's a common practice.
Two examples of names that aren't cultivar names, also from our own listings that are useful for spotting the difference:
Cereus “wild crest”. This describes a cristate (crested) growth mutation, a physical form, not a registered cultivar. It's correctly written without quotes-as-cultivar-marker because it isn't one; it's a descriptive trade name. If a specific crested clone were later named and registered, it would look like Cereus 'Some Name'.
Consolea rubescens (Road Kill Cactus). A straight species name, with “Road Kill Cactus” as a common name, not a cultivar. Common names are never italicized or quoted; they just sit in parentheses or plain text.
Why this actually matters for you as a buyer
Beyond bothering over punctuation, correct naming is genuinely useful when you're buying xerophytes: it tells you whether you're getting a wild-type species (predictable, stable, true from seed) or a named clone (guaranteed identical to the parent plant, but only if propagated vegetatively). Knowing the difference between a hybrid and a registered cultivar also helps you tell a genuinely distinct, intentionally bred plant apart from a vague, unlabeled “mystery succulent”.
We have a hard time figuring out any intergeneric hybrid in the Euphorbia genus or the caudiciform category. Do you know of any? Pls DM us to let us know.
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