How Can Gardeners Ensure the Uniformity of a New Plant Variety?

Gardeners with plant breeding knowledge and skills can develop distinct varieties as they choose features to improve, or new combinations of plant features; this can be done through methods like grafting or budding. If they do succeed in obtaining a plant that is different, then they must walk the long path of having it recognised as such.

If your ultimate goal is to have your variety licensed, then you must be able to prove that you created more individual plants that exhibit the same characteristics. It can be about esthetics or about improved yielding, superior resistance and so on. You must be able to generate many such specimens, all to exhibit the same desired traits. This means the variety is uniform. Also, the traits must be perpetuated, meaning that every plant offspring will have to be the same.

There is one way to show that your newly bred plants are uniform. Take them to plant trials, where the distinct varieties are growing side by side for comparisons. A plant trial is like a test site. It can serve multiple purposes; these also ensure that gardeners can choose plants which are more suitable to the climate they're in and will perform well in the given weather and soil conditions. Trials are usually available within universities, but are also found with local horticulture experts and private plant breeding companies.

As flowers and vegetables grow in plant trials, they are deemed either suitable or unfit for the region's climate and soil. They can be observed through their entire life cycle to assess the stability of the new traits. Should this succeed and every individual plant retain the engineered characteristics, then you may call it a uniform variety. This is one of the basic criteria for licensing or patenting.

Uniformity, along with stability and distinctiveness, can pave the way to recognition. You will be able to apply for plant protection, choose a denomination for it and benefit of so-called intellectual property rights.

In a plant trial, you can actually have the opportunity to grow multiple varieties of the same plant and compare them. Before you go to a plant trial, you may want to bring your varieties to a nursery first. However, you may still do this at home or in a breeder's garden or greenhouse.