Naming & Classification

Botany: A Blooming History (Part 1) - A Confusion of Names (Classification & Taxonomy)

• Plants contain medicine!

  • • (breast cancer & leukemia) - knowing how plants are related can help us find cures to related illnesses

    • antimalarial drug - looking amongst related species (using molecular fingerprinting with genetics) to find best plant for a source of compounds

• John Ray

  • • Natural Order of plants using flowers, seeds, seed vessels, sepals, how seeds split, flowers, stems, roots, first leaves to emerge, and mature leaves

    • Collected plants, pressed them, observed them

    • Variation within species (just like children in the same family look different)

    • flowers, seeds, seed vessels, sepals --> useful in defining species because they don't have much within species variation

      • • helped to determine the definition of SPECIES in plants

    • There are really two sorts of seeds

      • • dicot (like beans) - split into two pieces easily

        • monocot (like corn) - does not split into two easily

• flowers, stems, roots, first leaves to emerge, and mature leaves --> also useful to classify plants

• Carl Linnaeus

  • • Classifying plants is all about sex

      • male part of flower - stamen

      • female part of flower - pistil

    • Flowers of different species have different numbers of male and female parts - Linnaeus believed he could classify plants by looking at patterns of male and female parts in flowers alone

    • Published Systema Naturae as a way to classify plants via male and female flower parts

    • Linnaeus's struggle to get his classification system accepted in England

    • Noticed unwieldy plant names (too long and not standardized) - came up with rules for naming plants - wrote Species Plantarum

      • • two words, latin (mostly)

          • first word - "manufacturer's name"

          • second word - "models of the things they make"

    • This binomial system became accepted worldwide (except Miller) so that everyone could communicate, identify, classify and make it easy and coherent

  • Linnaeus came up with a great naming system but is not entirely correct when it comes to plant classification by using flower parts for taxonomy...genetic evidence continues to try and sort our plant taxonomy - fundamental flaw was focusing on flowers alone (warned against by John Ray)

• Phillip Miller

  • • recognized need for classification from participating in the international plant trade - no standardized naming conventions

    • founded the society of gardeners to name plants that are coming in from abroad by determining differences

      • • society collapsed but made Miller famous - Director of Chelsea Garden

    • He wrote The Gardener's and Florists Dictionary or a Complete System of Horticulture (1724) - got rid of ambiguity by listing all names for a single plant together - but ignored how plants were related!

• Miller and Linnaeus rivalry

• Thomas Fairchild

  • • first scientifically created hybrid by manual pollination - was sterile

    • concern and guilt as a response to church's doctrine on creation as fixed (God created all species and humans could not create others)

• Why are many hybrid plants sterile? - cannot produce viable offspring

  • • Darwin and evolution - plants that are more closely related are more likely to produce viable offspring

The Poison Garden - having a knowledge of how plants are related allows for the production of medicines...but also poisons!

This video demonstrates the approach of figuring out how plants are related to each other in order to extract