On Sep 1, 4:45*am, Dave Poole wrote:
Nick wrote:
I am surprised that you said that - rather than me!

I've become thoroughly cheesed off with having to learn new names
every coule of years Nick and am joining the ranks of grumpy old men.
The way plants are being shunted from pillar to post nowadays makes
your head spin. *It's all well and good having a revision of a genus
to iron out a few irregularities and re-assign one or two aberrant
species, but to screw the whole lot up strikes me as being work for
the sake of work and nothing else. *It about time for the lumpers to
reassert themselves and repair the damage that their schizoid
counterparts have wrought.

Bob *wrote:
Then there's what they have done to confuse us all with Laelia, Sophronitis
and Cattleya, some plants have been in all three seemingly in as many years.

Not forgetting Epidendrum, which has been under attack for some
time.

If they start on the Paphs and Phrags I will get annoyed.

Ah well, what's the betting they'll take Paphs, Phrags (inc Mexi!),
Cyps and Selenipediums out of the orchidaceae altogether? *It's been
mooted before and you can be certain there's some geeky loon out there
desperately poring through the dna in the hope of discovering a
pifling trifle that enables him/her to gain fame or infamy.

My message to them is quite clear, stop buggering things up, you bunch
of taxsodomists!

I'll get my coat.

My personal gripe is a relatively minor one but I only recently
realised that more or less half of the plant families that I used to
know have been done away with. Some genius decided that you cannot
have a plant family that is purely descriptive such as Leguminosae or
Compositae; you have to name the family after one of its genera. In
most cases it is not so hard seeing as the family names are easy to
guess if the chosen genus is a familiar one and most are. I used to
be a taxonomist a long time ago; glad I gave it up; it's a young man's
game now :-).