In message
, Des
Higgins writes
On Sep 2, 3:34*pm, Des Higgins wrote:
On Sep 2, 1:49 pm, Stewart Robert Hinsley
wrote:





In message
, Des
Higgins writes

On Sep 1, 7:56 pm, Stewart Robert Hinsley
wrote:
In message
, Des
Higgins writes

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

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,

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 :-).

That's not completely true - several descriptive family names were
grandfathered in as legitimate alternatives to names based on genera.
Leguminosae and Compositae are among them. (The use of these descriptive
family names is less frequent than it used to be, but it's still
legitimate.)

There's are also a few family names based on genus names that are not
currently recognised, e.g. Caryophyllaceae, Fabaceae, and Theaceae, and,
if I recall correctly, Cactaceae.

--
Stewart Robert Hinsley

ok, sounds like I only had half the picture. *I still find it
baffling, having to change the names of half the plant families I had
learned as a kid. *It is like Essex becoming Saffron Walden Shire or
Corwall becoming Padstowshire. * Those family names are great familiar
landmarks that help you to navigate a sea of nomenclature.

I'm puzzled as to what the half of plant families are that have had
their names changed. Liliaceae was chopped into pieces late last
century, and Fumariaceae and Corylaceae nowadays tend to be sunk in
Papaveraceae and Betulaceae nowadays, there's been a considerable
restructuring around Scrophulariaceae, and there is a generally tendency
to lump families nowadays. But Liliaceae and Scrophulariaceae still
exist.

For example the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group lumps Malvaceae, Bombacaceae,
Sterculiaceae and Tiliaceae (as per Cronquist) into Malvaceae (but the
new Heywood et al chops this into 12 families). Over history this group
has been divided into as few as 2, or as many as 14 families. Several
more distantly related groups were placed in Tiliaceae in the past.
--
Stewart Robert Hinsley

To name just a few that I can remember that I was brought up with:

Graminae
Umbelliferae
Compositae
Papillionaceae (and Leguminosae)
Cruciferae

ok, "half" is an exaggeration; it is "loads" though if you go through
the common ones (ones with familiar native and garden species).- Hide
quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

ok, to be fair, I have only managed to think of 2 more (Labiatae and
Guttiferae) so it is not so many.

Ah, because the older names are still legitimate, I didn't realise that
these were the ones you were referring to. (The other one is Palmae.)

See article 18.4 of the Vienna Code of the ICBN.

http://ibot.sav.sk/icbn/main.htm
--
Stewart Robert Hinsley