Cultivar Templates

Cultivar Templates are the official instrument sets issued under the Cultivar Standards for the certification of botanical illustrations, and constitute one of the eleven classes of the Register of Primary Standards. A Cultivar Template is not a plant. It is a rigid frame of brass and bone-ash card, cut with apertures of fixed dimension, against which a draughtsman's rendering of a cultivar is held and verified for permitted morphology, colour value, and leaf count. An illustration certified by template is admissible as evidence of cultivar identity in every forum of the Tower; one not so certified is admissible as decoration only, and need not be returned.

Construction and classes

Templates are graded in four classes, designated by Arabic numeral and a letter from A to D. Class 1 templates govern the Primary Cultivar and its singular depiction; Class 2 govern the Attenuated Cultivar series, including Cultivar M-44 and the remaining attenuated lineages; Class 3 govern Experimental Cultivar (EC) material, which by definition has no stable appearance and is certified against a blank aperture with an explanatory note; and Class 4 covers lumen-bearing stock, chiefly lumen-moss and the stocks catalogued at Luminous Moss. Class 4 templates must be held in a light-tight wallet between uses. Template greasing is permitted; template handling without gloves is not.

Each template carries three marks: the aperture, the lineage boss (a small stamped seal naming the cultivar's parent stock), and the rotation notch. The notch must face the draughtsman's right hand. The rule is stated without elaboration in the Standards, and the Standards have never explained it.

Issue and the Archive of Base Templates

Templates are struck from base instruments held in the Archive of Base Templates on Floor 212-Delta. The Archive holds approximately forty-one thousand base instruments, of which the keepers certify rather fewer as true originals; the remainder are misfiled copies or contested recensions, some of them contested for longer than the Archive has been open. A working template is issued in triplicate: one held by the illustrator, one deposited with the Cultivar Council, and one kept in the Archive against the base instrument from which it was struck. Loss of the third copy suspends the licence until the second copy is compared to the first, a procedure requiring four Librarians and a witness drawn from the Primary Witnesses.

The M-44 collation dispute

The principal recurring difficulty of the Template system is that an illustration certified under one template may fail certification under another struck from the same base. The celebrated instance concerns Mourning Moss in the winter of the year recorded in the Council's register as 14 after the Collation. A run of eleven certified plates of Cultivar M-44, prepared under Class 2 templates struck in the year 9, were submitted to re-certification under replacement templates struck in the year 13. Nine of the eleven failed on leaf count: the later templates showed an aperture admitting one leaf fewer than the earlier.

The Cultivar Council held, by ruling of the 3rd of the following month, that the discrepancy arose not from any change in the cultivar but from "drift in the base instrument, compounded by the hand of the striker." The ruling was appealed to the Concordance of Apertures, which had no jurisdiction over the matter and said so at length, but not before two of its commissioners had appended a dissent.

"A template certifies what it admits. It does not certify what it excludes, and the excluded leaf has no standing to complain."

— Concordance of Apertures, Dissent appended 9th of the following month

The Council's response, in the memorandum later catalogued as Note on the Standing of Excluded Leaves, was to instruct that all disputed plates be certified twice, once under each generation of template, and marked with a double boss. Plates so marked cannot be entered in evidence. The Council has never rescinded this instruction.

Scholarly disagreement

The standing account, set out in Cultivar Standard 22.γ and defended by the Council's own recorder, is that template drift is an artefact of use and can be corrected by trueing the aperture against the base instrument at intervals of seven years. Against this, the archivist-collector Ordinate Vell maintained in her Observations on Template Migration (Floor 212-Delta, dating uncertain, probably late in the Collation period) that the base instruments themselves migrate, and that trueing a working template to a migrating base merely transfers the fault.

The two positions are not strictly reconcilable, though Aperture Concordance 11. attempts it by holding that the base instruments migrate and the templates do not, while Third Concordance, Annex 4, holds the reverse. Both are cited in the same recension of the Standards. Vell's observations were quietly withdrawn from the open shelves for a period and returned, unaltered, with a slip reading "position noted, not adopted."

Certification in practice

An illustrator submits the rendering, the template, and the lineage boss to the certifying clerk, who holds the rendering against the aperture for the length of one slow count and strikes the certification seal if the specimen fills the aperture without overhang. Overhang is the commonest failure. A rendering may not be retouched after holding; the draughtsman may begin again, but on fresh paper, and the failed sheet is kept.

Certifications are entered in the loose-leaf ledger of Floor 212-Delta, in the hand of the certifying clerk. The present clerk, Under-Scribe Marn, has certified 6,204 plates since her appointment and has noted in the margin of the ledger that she does not certify on the fourth day of any week, as the light on that floor is unreliable before noon. No Concordance requires this. No Concordance forbids it either, and the practice is now treated as settled.