Plant Classifaction

Plant Classifaction
PlantExplorers.com

Classification was a complex and strange thing before Linnaeus developed his system, and became even stranger and more complex after.

Linnaeus was a great champion, and chief reviver, of Gaspard Bauhine's idea of giving all living things two names. Although the theory of binomial nomenclature had been around for almost one hundred years, it took Linnaeus to once again bring the idea forward and combine it with his unique system of sexual identification.

Although his system was designed to be simple, basing all flowering plant classification on the number of stamens in the bloom, and requiring the botanist to simply count them to determine which group the plant should be placed in, the complexity of nature was not so easily defined.

Through some translations, styles became wives, and stamens husbands, with their groupings being referred to as a marriage. This resulted in some very strange, and occasionally very funny, descriptions. Despite this peculiar result, in one form or another, Linnaeus' method was the standard for many years to come.

The core of his method was the binomial, or two name, method of classification that he championed, where all living things were given two basic latinized names to determine their relationship to all other living things. Gaspard Bauhine had first proposed this idea in his seminal work Pinax (1623) in which he described over 6000 plants and set out his basic criteria for classification, but it took over one hundred years before Carl Linnaeus resurected the idea.

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