Linnaean taxonomy

Let's just say it's in English.

And, um, you know, it, it starts with, you know, it's got these, it, it starts with a kind of diagram, like, a kind of almost like a Linnaean kind of, um, family tree of species.

Hmm.

Where it says, you know, there's a first partition that contains, like, sections, chapters.

I also don't like...

What's the term? Are they called Linnaean names or like, you know, like when like so people will see this like cannabis sativa and then say L and a lot of people like what's the L? And it's Linnaeus, right? It's Linnaeus.

But and other people, other prominent people, you know, would have names attached to the species that they designated that they like identified or like recorded in this sort of thing.

It was a lot more useful in the past and maybe it's more useful.

But Tolkien referred to all such white-flowered umbellifers, and not just the highly poisonous Conium maculatum, by the usual rural name of hemlock."

Now Garth quotes Christopher Tolkien as saying that his father, quote, "Regarded the restriction of a vernacular name to this or that species within a large group of plants not easily distinguishable to the eye as the pedantry of popularizing botanists, who ought to content themselves with the Linnaean names." So now that you've heard of some of the other names, along with Garth's description, you can picture them.

Tall stems growing quickly in the summer, especially in the shade, along woodland edges and hedgerows with big bunches of small white flowers.

Hopefully not the actual poisonous hemlock, as that could have been disastrous.

And I've never met a botanist So when they were showing me plants, and the way that I teach plants, I mean, I thought I was slightly bonkers when I was doing it initially, but everyone was getting it, was that this is how plant people in forests or forest people were teaching me plants, were showing me plants.

They weren't giving me a Linnaean classification system and, "Oh, there's a petiole, and look how many stamens and petals has it got." And that is really lovely stuff.

Don't get me wrong.

I'm not putting that down at all.

So when I first started teaching plants, I was using senses because to me, I have always, since I was born, smelt the world.

So the fact that there wasn't any description of smell in a book, which is actually quite hard because it's very subjective, frustrated me.

So I started doing it, and then I started teaching it on groups very tentatively, tiptoe-y, while everyone else was doing, you know, Linnaean stuff.

And, and everyone was getting it.

And this was taken up with als- with a relative amount of confusion, but with, in all sorts of different ways- [chuckles] ... and, and loads of experiments.

And I spoke to somebody in twen- who had grown a f- successfully a Linnaean floral clock in 2022, Sylvain Aubry- [chuckles] ... at, uh, the Bern Botanical Garden in Switzerland.

And, you know, it was after a huge amount of research, and it's possible to do it now much more successfully 'cause we have many more varieties of plants and so forth.

Um, but the- there are these histories.

We slot name tags on life's diversity through taxonomy, systems of labeling and categorizing organisms.

For over 250 years, biologists have largely used the Linnaean system of classification.

It files living things into groups called taxa based on observable traits that they share.

The sortings are basically a bunch of nested boxes.

Boxes like genus or family, for example, can be very broad or very specific depending on when in history they were coined.

I mean, there is literally one family for ants, more than 12,000 species, but just one family.

Whose idea was that? And because Linnaean taxonomy often relies on physical traits to sort organisms, it can miss other, less visible markers of relationship between species.

Enter systematics, the science of categorizing organisms based on their phylogeny, that fancy word for evolutionary history.