History of Plant Taxonomy

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History of Plant Taxonomy
In the West
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Purposes of Taxonomy (later, Systematics)

• Identify organisms (for various purposes)
• Name organisms
• Remember organisms
• Classify organisms
• Group like ones together
• Arrange organisms in hierarchy
• Arrange organisms in hierarchy that reveals true
  evolutionary relationships

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Early non-western plant texts

• Atharva Veda (and other Vedas) oral hymns from
  India dating from 1500 BC before being
  transcribed in Sanskrit give medicinal and
  ceremonial uses of more than 1000 plants
• Huang Ti Nei Jing Su Wen Ling Shu' (The Yellow
  Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine) China,
  between 2nd century BC and 8th century AD

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Early plant taxonomists (pre-Darwin)

• Theophrastus (370-285 BC)the father of botany
  wrote De Historia Plantarum
• Dioscorides ( 50 AD) De Materia Medica
• Gerard (1590s) produced several popular herbals
• Bauhin brothers (1620s) came up with a binomial
  system of nomenclature that preceded that of
  Linnaeus
• Linnaeus, Carolus (Carl von Linné 1707-1778)
  Species Plantarum, 1753

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Get with child a mandrake root . . . John Donne
Gerard 1597
Turner 1523
Dioscorides 50 AD
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From Gerards herbal Candy corne marigold (1597)
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Poppy, by Leonhart Fuchs, 1542
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By Mark Catesby (1683-1749), from Natural History
of the Carolinas, Florida and the Bahama Islands
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Piso Historia Naturalis Brasiliae (1648) at
last, someone goes to the tropics
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Linnaeus, not a skilled draftsman, used a sexual
system of plant classification
This plant is always fixed on some little turfy
hillock in the midst of swamps, as Andromeda
herself was chained to a rock in the sea ...
Dragons and venomous serpents surrounded her, as
toads and other reptiles frequent the abode of
her vegetable prototype ... As the distressed
virgin cast down her blushing face through
excessive affliction, so does the rosy-coloured
flower hang its head, growing paler and paler
till it withers away.  
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Linnaeus method of classification by number
of flower parts (first and foremost, stamens)
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Systema Naturae by Carolus Linnaeus, 1749
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A page from Species Plantarum
The origin of the Latin binomial, shown here for
a goldenrod, Solidago sempervirens
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Later Plant Taxonomists
Adanson Lamarck de Candolle de Jussieu
1740-1820s Moving toward natural classifications

Charles Darwin (1809-1882). Not a taxonomist, but
wrote characters which naturalists consider as
showing true affinity between any two or more
species, are those which have been inherited from
a common parent, all true classification being
genealogical . . . 1859
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By Nicklaus Jacquin, Vienna, 1797
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20th Century Plant Taxonomists Bessey Engler Cro
nquist, Thorne, Takhtajanthrough early
1990s Currently, field dominated by APG
(Angiosperm Phylogeny Group
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Maple from Japanese catalogue, 1898
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Cladogram the current goal of Systematics