Q&A Why so many Cannas the same?

Question.
Why do some Cannas that look the same have different names?

Answer.
In the absence of a Canna Society or registry for hybridizers, many Canna cultivars have been claimed, renamed, and even patented by nurseries or companies that had nothing to do with developing that cultivar.

Some Canna are also very generous with producing "sports,"which are mutations that can be propagated and sold as a new variety. The classic example is Canna 'Yellow King Humbert', which has produced many new all purple foliage plants with red flowers. The same sport may occur spontaneously at different nurseries and each might claim it as a new introduction and give it their own name. This causes a lot of confusion for Canna enthusiasts!

At Claines Canna we try to list the common alias for each variety in the description.

Wild species tamed

It has long been the practice when writing about Cannas to assert that the species are in total disarray, nobody knows how many there are or what the hundreds of published names are synonyms of. That is no longer the case.

Dr Nobuyuki Tanaka is a botanist at the Tokyo Metropolitan University and at the Makino Botanical Garden in Kochi prefecture, Japan. He has published a full taxonic revision of the Canna species and he has identified 19 species as being distinct and separate.

In addition, the botanists at Kew Gardens have assigned all of the published species names to one of the 19 accepted species, i.e. sorted the synonyms.

References:

• The original Canna checklist at Kew Gardens can be located at: http://www.kew.org/wcsp/.

• The Wikipedia has a separate article for Canna species, containg both the accepted species, plus all of the synonym names linked to the species. That article can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Canna_species and reflects both the taxonic revision and the Kew checklist.

• Tanaka, N. 2001. Taxonomic revision of the family Cannaceae in the New World and Asia. Makinoa ser. 2, 1:34–43.

Well done to everyone concerned... now if we can find a source of Canna liliiflora seed, then I'd be totally happy.