It all started with Carl Linnaeus (okay, not all of it, but you get the drift). Carl had one of those super-organized minds (I’ll bet he had the neatest sock drawer in the Western world), and he evidently couldn’t stand the state of biological indentification of his time, so he developed the binomial form of plant and animal identification so that people could write about a particular plant or animal and everyone would know exactly which one they meant. About time, too, as Europe was just about to embark on the great collecting and identifying mania of the 18th and 19th centuries, and his system was a definite boon to all those adventurers out in the jungles of Peru and China sending back herbarium specimens to institutes of higher learning in England and Germany.
So we all remember the System from our college days, right?—Kindly Pay Cash Or Furnish Good Security, or Kingdom Phylum Class Order Family Genus and Species. Of course it’s all changed by now, from Kingdom on down (there were only three Kingdoms when I was an undergrad, and now there are five, though most of us wouldn’t recognize the two new ones). Luckily, most of us dealing with plants don’t need to worry about anything other than Family, Genus, and Species, plus variety names. Good thing, as those have changed enough lately as it is.
The changes in nomenclature started soon after the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature was instituted in the early 1950s, with nomenclaturists and taxonomists firing missives off to scientific journals and each other, something they still do (though these days it's done by email and Twitter). The big problem is that though the binomial system works great, trying to organize all the relationships in order to understand the overall order is so complex it boggles the mind.
Enter computers and later on the ability to decode the genomes of individual plants and animals. Suddenly it's not plant taxonomy that counts anymore, it's systematics and cladistics. Before, plants were lumped together by how closely their reproductive parts matched or not, and now it's by how closely they are actually related regardless of how their flowers look. An improvement, yes? But it did —and does —require some names to be changed.
The Family names changed the most consistently. It seems that for a couple of hundred years since Linnaeus, the Family names were descriptive, naming a group of plants by how their flowers looked. So the daisy family, with their composite flowers, was originally the Compositae, which made a lot of sense, the mint family was named Labiatidae for the lipped flowers, and the parsley family was Umbelliferae for the sort of umbrella shape made by their many tiny flowers.
This was all apparently too imprecise, so the whole descriptive thing was changed, and now the name refers to the “type” plant, one plant chosen to represent the entire family. So now the daisies are Asteracea after the aster, the mints are not named for an actual mint but are the Lamiacea, after Lamium (dead nettle [an unfortunate name if there ever was one]), and the lovely umbrella-flowered parsleys are now in the family Apiacea, named for the celery, chosen as the type plant. Celery doesn’t even make a decent umbrella, but then I suppose that's the point. From an organizational point of view this is all a large improvement, but I feel we may have lost a bit of poetry along the way.
Find out more about how Santa Fe Botanical Garden celebrates, cultivates and conserves the rich botanical heritage and biodiversity of the region. Visit www.santafebotanicalgarden.org