Same Plant Family?

When considering: cultural requirements; seed collecting-starting; water and light requirements; deadheading; etc. of a certain plant, can we look to the Family of the plant? Does this Family have enough common characteristics to tell us the seeds can be started in the same manner? The majority of these plants are, say, drought tolerant, love full sun, bloom in the fall, or some such trait? Is this possibly a way in which we can know more about a certain plant, just by knowing it's Family name?

good question

Indeed, an excellent question and the answer is no.

The families have (until fairly recently) have been made up of plants that have a certain amount of similarity in their morphology, now they are being classified according to DNA but that (like all sciences) is a work in progress.

The only thing you can reasonably rely on with a family is that the genera within the family will have similar physiological attributes. When someone says Papaveraceae family we can safely assume that the majority of the plants look something like a Poppy (Meconopsis and Papaver immediately come to mind), but then we find that under the new DNA classification, Corydalis is also in the Papaveraceae (under a sub-family of Fumariaceae). Papaver, Meconopsis and Corydalis all have different basic growing requirements.

In some cases you might find a family (or perhaps more usually a sub-family) that has very few members and all these members grow in a similar locale or climate.

So in conclusion, family classification can't be relied upon to give us information about the growing situation of the family's various genera, it only tells us what genera are closely related to each other.




This message was edited Thursday, Jan 23rd 3:40 AM

All plant classification was done by a Swedish man named Linneaus. He relied on flower characteristics to determine how they are classified. Linneaus lived in the time when new plants were being "discovered" at a phenomenal rate, the 18th century. Almost all the plants of the New World, the Southern Hemisphere, the Orient, and sub-Sahara Africa were just being brought to Europe by the explorers.

Now with the huge advances in science and technology, a lot of his work has come into question; that is why so many well-known plants are being re-classified and re-re-classified. That will likely continue to happen for several more decades.

Linnaeus was considered disgusting by some of his peers for his work because it focued on the sexual parts of the plants.

Morphology classification from the late 1700's onwards took this further and with more accuracy than the sexual classification. It has been changing and improving ever since Linnaeus set down his system. Phytochemical classification was (and still is) used and again improved but not always used with morphological classification.