Clivia Terms and Definitions

This new section has been started to help educate the public. There is alot of information that needs to go here, but this is a start.

There is a book titled "Illustrated Terms and Definitions for Describing Clivia" for sale in the NACS Store.

Group = merely means a bunch of plants that sort of look similar to each other.
Strains or Seed Strains = Plants that are propagated from seed that carry some implications of genetic relatedness. They are not genetically identical, neither to each other nor to either of their parents. Over many, many generations of inbreeding and back-breeding, plants of a strain can become more and more similar to each other. Still they are probably never going to become identical in all respects.
Clones = Plants that were all propagated vegetatively from one single original mother plant. All members of a clone are genetically identical (save for any occasional somatic mutations).

An important NOTE from the Past President of NACS:

As far as I'm concerned, it is very important that we maintain the distinctions between clones, seed-propagated strains, and the new "Groups." We do no service to the public and we undercut each other's breeding efforts when we muddy the waters between these three concepts. If someone sells seeds labelled 'Vico Yellow' you know that -- at best! -- they are selling seeds that are actually ['Vico Yellow' X unknown]. Everyone in the broad Clivia community needs to understand that neither ['Vico Yellow' X unknown] nor ['Vico Yellow' X self] will produce plants that are genetically identical to 'Vico Yellow'. To offer plants or seeds claiming otherwise is not accurate.

Jim Shields
in central Indiana (USA)