FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

i always see this word but i never understand it "cultivar " and is it referred to as a person, place or thing?
also, what are the names of the vft on the top of the pg?

thanks

kevinqwe wrote:i always see this word but i never understand it "cultivar " and is it referred to as a person, place or thing?

Hey there Kevinqwe,

I probably can't explain it as good as others might, but a cultivar is a specific type of a venus flytrap people grew from seeds that stood out from the rest, like all red types, huge trap types, etc. Then from there, propagation was used to make clones of these cultivars and sent or sold out to anyone that wanted them.

kevinqwe wrote: what are the names of the vft on the top of the pg?

Check out the gallery on the home page to know what types those cultivars are, but from left to right, looks like a typical [which is what wild dionaeas look like] red pirahna, sawtooth, and maybe a dracula trap I'm not 100% sure XD

Hope that helps alittle.

kevinqwe wrote:i always see this word but i never understand it "cultivar " and is it referred to as a person, place or thing?
also, what are the names of the vft on the top of the pg?

thanks

A cultivar is a way to divide plants from the same species. The official term "subspecies" can't be used for VFTs because the genetic difference between them is too small.

I'll make a comparison to dogs.

Canis lupus is a species and it contains several subspecies, for example: wolf (C. lupus lupus), dog (C. lupus familiaris), and dingo (C. lupus dingo), and if we look at the "dog" subspecies, we see a lot of 'cultivars': German Shepard, Bull Terrier, Chihuahua, Rottweiler, ....

In Venus Flytraps, the species is Dionaea muscipula, but it doesn't have subspecies, in other words, there is no plant in the world closely enough related to the Flytrap to be the same species (Dionaea muscipula), but different enough to be a subspecies (like a wolf is different from a dog). We do see a lot of cultivars though: Red Piranha, Sawtooth, Cross Teeth, Cupped Trap, Dentate, ....

Now, for some people it's difficult to understand this, because a German Shepard looks more related to a wolf than a Chihuahua, but the classification in species and subspecies is not based on appearance, it's rather based on genetic makeup nowadays (it used to be different in the pre-genetic era, where classification was done on appearance).