I had a chance to talk cannas today, and came home with a plant of one of the so-called banana-leaf cannas. Many modern references give the name of this as ‘musifolia’. That got me thinking: since this is an old (nineteenth century) cultivar, I was pretty sure that the name had originally been spelled musaefolia. For purposes of this discussion. let’s assume that that is true. If this were a species canna, the change from musaefolia to musifolia would be in accordance with the current international rules for botanical nomenclature. But this is not a species, it’s a cultivar or hybrid. That being the case, can we retain the original spelling musaefolia? Can some one with access to the rules for cultivated plants let me know? Also, the wiki states that cannas were not brought into cultivation until the early nineteenth century. We might quibble about what “brought into cultivation” means, but this much is known: Clusius saw them planted near house walls in Spain and Portugal (probably during his travels in the sixteenth century) and Parkinson (early seventeenth century 1629) describes two forms, one red-flowered and one yellow-flowered, which had bloomed in English gardens of his time. We need to fix that. Jim McKenney jimmckenney@jimmckenney.com Montgomery County, Maryland, USA, 39.03871º North, 77.09829º West, USDA zone 7 My Virtual Maryland Garden http://www.jimmckenney.com/ BLOG! http://mcwort.blogspot.com/ Webmaster Potomac Valley Chapter, NARGS Editor PVC Bulletin http://www.pvcnargs.org/ Webmaster Potomac Lily Society http://www.potomaclilysociety.org/