In my opinion, we need to consider our audience. What's important to me, as an ATP member is being able to search a plant in our database by what my plant tag says it's called. I am totally supportive of the true documented cultivar info being there, but truly, if I bought Alyssum Clear Crystal Purple Shades and took a picture of it, I would hope that I could type in Alyssum Clear Crystal and see the variety Purple Shades be a ATP search result. If I was entering this particular one, I would put the Genus Lobularia, species as maritima, the cultivar name as "Alyssum Clear Crystal Purple Shade" Trade Name as Alyssum Clear Crystal Purple Shades. But that's just me and trying to keep the info of what we see for plant tags and such usable with our database as it's set up. The way we have it set up, it's almost too rigid and resulted in compromises. For example, we can not use the "Series" field for the Petunia data base, since a huge number are with patents pending and no patented cultivar name. The choice is have a data base of "only" patented varieties or open it up to what's being sold. From what I can see, we can not enter a Trade Name with out the cultivar name, so what I have done in Petunias is put the trade name in the cultivar name as well. Otherwise our database will be very very tiny. When it come to annuals, we need to have all the new varieties, since that is what the market will be flooded with. Most new varieties will have a patent pending and not numbered or registered cultivar name. So if we don't have a separate option for pending patents, then our best choice is putting that tradename in the cultivar field.
This entire name thing is awful. It doesn't seem that we have a great option for annuals, specifically, since those change so frequently and tons of new varieties pop up every season. Perhaps there needs to be some thoughts put towards the database and how to handle the mass amount of "new annual varieties" each year of many plant genus
