cultivar, term developed by professional botanists to mean a group of plants sharing common characteristics persisting under cultivation that have either been selected or otherwise genetically manipulated by humans. According to the rules of plant taxonomy, cultivar would be a more appropriate term than variety but the term does not have a wide following outside professional botanists and horticulturists, except in South Africa, where it is widely and generally used. It has a major deficiency in that it has no adjectival form, and therefore no counterpart to varietal.
