page_title: Canna (plant)
section_title: Horticultural varieties (cultivars)
hierarchical_section_title: Canna (plant) / Uses / Horticultural varieties (cultivars)
caption_attribution_description: English: Canna Crozy Group 'Theresa Blakey'
context_page_description: Canna or canna lily is the only genus of flowering plants in the family Cannaceae, consisting of 10 species. Cannas are not true lilies, but have been assigned by the APG II system of 2003 to the order Zingiberales in the monocot clade Commelinids, together with their closest relatives, the gingers, spiral gingers, bananas, arrowroots, heliconias and birds of paradise.
  The plants have large foliage and horticulturists have developed selected forms as large-flowered garden plants. Cannas are also used in agriculture as a rich source of starch for human and animal consumption.
  Although plants of the tropics, most cultivars have been developed in temperate climates and are easy to grow in most countries of the world as long as they receive at least 6–8 hours average sunlight during the summer, and are moved to a warm location for the winter. See the Canna cultivar gallery for photographs of Canna cultivars.
  The name Canna originates from the Latin word for a 'cane' or 'reed'.
context_section_description: See the List of Canna cultivars for photographs of Canna cultivars.
  Cannas became very popular in Victorian times as garden plants and were grown widely in France, Germany, Hungary, India, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States.  Some cultivars from this time, including a sterile hybrid, usually referred to as Canna × ehemannii, are still commercially available. C. × ehemannii is tall and green leafed with terminal drooping panicles of hot pink iris like flowers, looking somewhat like a cross between a banana and a fuchsia.
  As tender perennials in northern climates, they suffered severe setbacks when two world wars sent the young gardening staff off to war. It took many years for the frugalities of war and its rationing subsequences to change to the more prosperous times of the late 20th century. The genus Canna has recently experienced a renewed interest and revival in popularity.
  Once, hundreds of cultivars existed, but many are now extinct. In 1910, Árpäd Mühle, from Hungary, published his Canna book, written in German. It contained descriptions of over 500 cultivars.
  In recent years, many new cultivars have been created, but the genus suffers severely from having many synonyms for many popular ones. Most of the synonyms were created by old varieties resurfacing without viable names, with the increase in popularity from the 1960s onwards. Research has accumulated over 2,800 Canna cultivar names, but many of these are simply synonyms.
  See List of Canna hybridists for details of the people and firms that created the current Canna legacy.
  In the early 20th century, Professor Liberty Hyde Bailey defined, in detail, two 'garden species' (C. × generalis and C. × orchiodes) to categorise the floriferous cannas being grown at that time, namely the Crozy hybrids and the 'orchid-like' hybrids introduced by Carl Ludwig Sprenger in Italy and Luther Burbank in the USA, at about the same time (1894). The definition was based on the genotype, rather than the phenotype, of the two cultivar groups. Inevitably, over time those two floriferous groups were interbred, the distinctions became blurred and overlapped, and the Bailey species names became redundant. Pseudo-species names are now deprecated by the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants which, instead, provides Cultivar Groups for categorising cultivars (see groups at List of Canna cultivars).
caption: Canna (Crozy Group) 'Theresa Blakey'
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