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Chimera Group

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 CannaCleopatra’ is just a synonym of CannaYellow 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.

Technical description
A chimera or chimaera is a single organism that is composed of two or more different populations of genetically distinct cells that originated from different zygotes involved in sexual reproduction. If the different cells have emerged from the same zygote, the organism is called a mosaic. Chimeras are formed from at least four parent cells (two fertilized eggs or early embryos fused together). Each population of cells keeps its own character and the resulting organism is a mixture of tissues.