Plant labels carry a kind of fine print. Between the genus and the species name — or standing where a species name should be — you will find small Latin abbreviations: sp., cf., aff., sometimes sp. nov., and in a hybrid, the multiplication sign ×. They are easy to skim past, and sellers do not always explain them. That is a pity, because those few letters are often the most honest part of the label. They tell you how certain the identification is, who is making the claim, and how much of the claim rests on documents rather than on resemblance. I am a physician by training, and I read a plant label the way I read a chart: the qualifiers are not decoration. They are the part that tells you how far the evidence actually goes.
This is the first entry in a glossary series I am building for this journal. Each entry takes a term growers meet on labels and in listings and grades it the same way: what it properly means, how the trade misuses it, and what you should understand when you meet it on a price tag. Nothing here is a rule I invented. These are working conventions of botanical nomenclature — the system called open nomenclature — as they are used in the taxonomic literature, in databases such as Kew's Plants of the World Online and the World Flora Online, and in Araceae publications by specialists such as Thomas B. Croat of the Missouri Botanical Garden.
First, how to read the label itself
A scientific name has two parts: the genus (Anthurium) and the specific epithet (besseae). Both are italicized. The qualifiers in this glossary are not part of the name. They are annotations about the identification, written in ordinary (non-italic) type, and they sit between the genus and the epithet: Anthurium cf. besseae. The International Code of Nomenclature governs how names are published and formed; these little qualifiers live alongside the Code rather than inside it, as a shared convention among taxonomists for saying, precisely, "this is how sure I am." Placement matters, italics matter, and once you see the pattern you can read a label's confidence level at a glance.
sp. — "a species, not yet named on this label"
Properly. Sp. is the abbreviation of species (the plural is spp.). A label reading Philodendron sp. says: this plant belongs in Philodendron, and the identification stops there. It may be an undescribed plant. It may equally be a perfectly well-described species that nobody has yet matched to a name — because the plant is a juvenile, because it has not flowered, or because its collection data were lost along the way. Sp. by itself makes no claim either way, and that restraint is the point.
In the trade. The common misuse is inflation: sp. quietly upgraded in a listing to "rare undescribed species" when the seller has no evidence the plant is undescribed rather than merely unidentified. The opposite misuse also happens — a locality or a seller's code gets attached ("sp. Ecuador," "sp. 'Green Form'") and starts circulating as if it were a name. It is not. It is a filing label, useful for keeping track of a plant, and it should travel with the plant as a label rather than harden into a pseudo-name.
On a price tag, read it as: genus confirmed, species open. You are buying a plant whose final identity is unresolved, and any price that depends on it being a particular species — or a new one — is a price built on an unfinished identification.
cf. — "compare with: probably this species, unconfirmed"
Properly. Cf. is short for the Latin confer, "compare with." Anthurium cf. besseae reads as "an Anthurium to be compared with besseae: it matches that species as far as can be told, but the identification has not been confirmed." Confirmation, in practice, means checking the plant — ideally in flower — against the original published description and type material, and knowing where the original material was collected. Leaf resemblance alone, especially in juveniles, rarely settles an aroid identification.
The worked example from my own collection. I grow a velvet-leaf anthurium sold to me as Anthurium cf. besseae, and I have written about it in this journal ("Anthurium cf. besseae: What Those Two Letters Mean"). The true A. besseae Croat was described in 2005 from lowland forest in Cochabamba, Bolivia. My plant matches its description well. But provenance for trade plants is often lost between collector, importer, and nursery, and without collection data or a flowering comparison against the protologue, "cf." is as far as honesty goes. The qualifier is not a downgrade. It is the accurate statement of where the identification stands.
In the trade. Two misuses to watch for. First, the cf. gets dropped as the plant changes hands, and a tentative identification silently becomes a certain one — a plant that entered the trade as cf. besseae is three sellers later simply besseae. Second, the reverse marketing move: cf. attached to a fashionable name the plant only vaguely resembles, borrowing the name's prestige while keeping an escape hatch.
On a price tag, read it as: a probable identification, honestly flagged as unproven. A seller who keeps the cf. on the label through resale is showing you their standard of evidence. That is worth something. It is not the same as a confirmed species, and it should not be priced or re-sold as one without the work of confirmation being done.
aff. — "close to this species, and probably not it"
Properly. Aff. is short for affinis, "having affinity with, related to." Where cf. leans toward "probably this species," aff. leans the other way: Anthurium aff. besseae says "near besseae, but believed to be distinct from it — quite possibly an undescribed species." The writer is not failing to identify the plant. The writer is recording a judgment, usually based on some consistent difference — in the blade, the inflorescence, the growth habit, or the plant's origin — that separates it from the named species it most resembles.
In the trade. Because aff. implies possible novelty, it attracts the same inflation as sp. nov. (below): labels acquire an aff. the way listings acquire the word "rare." But a defensible aff. rests on a stated difference from a stated species. If a seller cannot say how the plant differs from the species named after the aff., the qualifier is decoration. Note also that cf. and aff. are not interchangeable hedges for "not sure." They point in opposite directions, and swapping one for the other changes the claim being made.
On a price tag, read it as: you are being offered a plant the seller believes is something other than — and near to — a known species. That can be genuinely interesting; some of the most distinctive plants in collections entered them under an aff. It can also be unresolvable for years, because describing a new species is slow, specimen-based work. Buy the plant in front of you, not the description it may one day receive.
sp. nov. — "believed new to science, not yet described"
Properly. Sp. nov. — species nova, "new species" — is a working annotation used by taxonomists, on herbarium sheets and in manuscripts, for material they judge to be a species that has never been formally described. Two cautions belong with it. First, it is a judgment, not a result: until a name is validly published — with a description or diagnosis, a designated type specimen, and the other requirements of the Code — there is no new species in the scientific record, only a candidate for one. Second, "undescribed" and "unidentified" are different conditions. A plant can lack a name because it is new, or because nobody has yet done the comparison work against the species already described.
In the trade. Here the misuse is the most direct of any term in this glossary: sp. nov. used as a sales category for fresh imports. An unidentified plant from a poorly collected region may indeed prove new. It may also prove to be a known species outside its previously documented range, a regional form, or a hybrid. Nobody can tell from a photograph of a juvenile leaf, and the Darién plant I grow — traded as an undescribed Anthurium species, possibly new — is one I label and write about as a trade attribution, not an established fact, for exactly this reason.
On a price tag, read it as: a hypothesis. Treat sp. nov. on a commercial label the way you would treat a preliminary result in a paper: interesting, worth attention, and not yet a finding.
× — the hybrid formula
Properly. The multiplication sign (×, not the letter x) marks a hybrid. A hybrid formula lists the parents: Anthurium dressleri × papillilaminum, for example, claims those two species as the cross's parents. In breeders' records the seed parent is conventionally written first, but trade labels are inconsistent about order, so unless a breeder documents their convention, read a formula as a claim about parentage, not about which parent carried the seed. A formula is only as reliable as the record behind it — a controlled cross with a documented breeder is a different grade of evidence from a name reconstructed afterward because a plant looks intermediate. Where a hybrid has been formally named as a taxon, the × attaches to the hybrid epithet itself; the named garden hybrids most growers know are instead cultivars, written with the cultivar epithet in single quotes, such as Anthurium 'Circus Peanuts'.
In the trade. Parentage is where confident storytelling most often outruns the record. Formulas circulate in multiple versions for the same named hybrid, repeated from listing to listing without a primary source; parentage gets "corrected" by resemblance; and seed-grown plants from an uncontrolled pollination acquire a tidy two-parent formula they may not have. None of this makes a plant less worth growing. It does mean the formula should be read as attribution — reported as — unless breeder documentation accompanies it.
On a price tag, read it as: a claim about ancestry that deserves the same question as any other claim: whose record says so? A named breeder, a cross code, and a mother plant that can be pointed to are evidence. A formula that appears only in marketplace listings is tradition — sometimes accurate, never self-proving.
The whole system, in one view
- sp. — genus known; species not identified. No claim about novelty.
- cf. — probably the named species; identification unconfirmed.
- aff. — close to the named species; believed distinct from it, possibly undescribed.
- sp. nov. — believed new to science; not described, not named, not yet a finding.
- × — a hybrid; the formula is a parentage claim, graded by the record behind it.
Read this way, the fine print stops being clutter. A label is a small scientific statement, and these qualifiers are how a careful grower tells you exactly how much of that statement is established, how much is probable, and how much is still an open question. When I label my own plants, I try to keep the qualifier that matches the evidence — including when the honest label is the less impressive one. I would encourage you to ask the same of anyone selling to you: not certainty, which is often the one thing a label cannot honestly offer, but accuracy about uncertainty. In my experience, the growers who get the little letters right tend to get the rest right too.
Sources and further reading
- Bengtson, P. (1988). Open nomenclature. Palaeontology 31: 223–227. The short, classic statement of the conventions behind cf., aff., and sp.
- Sigovini, M., Keppel, E., & Tagliapietra, D. (2016). Open nomenclature in the biodiversity era. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 7: 1217–1225. A modern review of how these qualifiers should be used and recorded.
- Turland, N. J., et al. (eds) (2018). International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants (Shenzhen Code). The Code governs the names themselves; the qualifiers in this entry are the convention used alongside it.
- Plants of the World Online (POWO), Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew — powo.science.kew.org; and the World Flora Online — worldfloraonline.org. The working references for whether a name is accepted, and for the names these qualifiers point to.
- International Aroid Society — aroid.org, including its journal Aroideana, where Araceae identifications and new taxa in this family are published and discussed.
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