In general usage the word indigen is treated as a variant of the word indigene, meaning a native.
Usage in botany However, it was used in a strictly botanical sense for the first time in 1918 by Liberty Hyde Bailey ((1858–1954) an American horticulturist, botanist and cofounder of the American Society for Horticultural Science) and described as a plant
" of known habitat ". Later, in 1923, Bailey formally defined the indigen as:
Botanical definition " ... a species of which we know the nativity, - one that is somewhere recorded as indigenous. " The term was coined to contrast with cultigen which he defined in the 1923 paper as: " ... the species, or its equivalent, that has appeared under domestication, – the plant is cultigenous."
See also Cultigen Alien (biology) Native Naturalization (biology)
References