The Chimera Group is where all the cultivars that result from a chimeral mutation are grouped.
This is useful, as it stops the agonising over whether Canna ‘Cleopatra’ is just a synonym of Canna ‘Yellow King Humbert’, and what about canna ‘ TyTy Red’, is it just another marketing name for ‘America’? They can now all be itemised in this group.
This grouping means that they can all be grouped together equally, until documentary or laboratory evidence provides us with facts to the contrary.
The hardest part with the Chimera Group is establishing synonyms, typically we have a situation where, for example, we know that Yellow King Humbert was first documented about 1918 and that Cleopatra appeared (identical in looks) in the 1980′s, but can we prove they are the same plants, or was Cleopatra the result of a later mutation that took place in China? With no way of proving these relationships, and so this is a much better immediate solution.