[Jeffery_Goss]

"varieties" are actually polyphyletic



It turns out that several popular tomato varieties are polyphyletic. That is to say, they have a wide variation and may come from different sources. Some are landraces; others are just CV's that got out of hand genetically, or those whose names became so popular that they were co-opted by similar-looking or similar-tasting strains.

Some polyphyletic tomato categories include:

Brandywine/Mikado (from Mexico to England to USA, all in a period of 20 years in the late 1800s; there were so many offshoot strain that Brandywine simply became a descriptive term for tomatoes that fit a certain profile, rather than a documented line of ancestry)

Mortgage Lifter (definitely polyphyletic--at least two, possibly three, original sources including Radiator Charlie)

Hillbilly (a landrace from WV and southeast Ohio, west of the Appalachians; accessed and stabilized many times, each time into a slightly different strain with the same name)

Cherokee Purple (has a lot of offshoot strains but is not exactly polyphyletic, since all came from same original accession from landrace, as far as I know)

Cherry (there are many types of cherry tomatoes, but when simply labelled "Cherry" they are being described in a polyphyletic way)

Siberian (except when it clearly refers to the variety properly called by the simple name of Siberian)

Big Ben (the name was co-opted)

Traveler/Arkansas Traveler (name was co-opted at least once, possible twice or thrice)

Abraham Lincoln (not exactly polyphyletic since they all come from same source, but a lot of breeding work has been performed on it, and it has diverged into several homonymous strains)

Akers (same situation as above)