Confused about plant species...

I been doing a lot of looking at different cultivators of Japanese Maples. They are the same species but they all look so different. That got me to thinking about what makes a plant part of a species. Some JM's have almost nothing in common. One type can have dark red leaves 2" long with 4 points, grow only 4' tall, with a weeping growth habit. Another type can have lime green leaves 6" long with 7 points, grow 15" tall, with a upright growth. A person that is new at all this can not help but wonder what plant the people that made the naming system up where smoking...it just makes no since at all.

What is it about a Acer palmatum a Acer palmatum?
What is the difference in Acer palmatum, freemanii, or the others?
What makes one not sure that a one species is not just a cultivation of some other species.
Since I am here on the topic heck what makes a Acer and Acer.

What is a guy to do? It would be way to much work to design and build a time machine just to go back and shoot the guy that started this naming system...lol. But really I think the best way for me to start to learn the names of the different trees is but learning what make a tree fall into this family or that. Then once I get good at that then work on species, then cultivators. To do that though I would have to know what it take to be in this group or that one. The only other option I can think of is to try to just learn a small handfull of trees at a time but I think that would take so much longer and would not be as helpful in trying to ID a tree type.

There has to be a book out or website that tells exactly what a plant has to have in order to be in this family or that family...or this species or that species.

Nowadays they can use genetic testing to establish what's related to what, but before our high tech days they generally used characteristics of the plants to see what's related to what (and they change their minds...I think the things that are in the same family stay relatively stable, but genera are lumped together, and then split apart, and then lumped together again, same things with species.)

Here's a website that gives a very quick overview of how plants are divided up http://theseedsite.co.uk/class.html There are probably numerous books on the subject as well if you want more detail. And here's a site that has info on the classification info for at least some of the plant families if you want to see the distinguishing characteristics. http://www.geobotany.uaf.edu/teaching/biol474/plant_family_charact.html

Honestly though, you don't need to be an expert in this stuff to be able to identify plants, about the only botanical characteristic I could quote you is that plants in Lamiaceae have square stems, but I am still pretty decent at identifying plants. I can look at something that someone posted on the ID forum and know that it's in Malvaceae family for example without being able to articulate at all what botanical characteristics are that separate Malvaceae from the other plant families. Sometimes you don't necessarily know how you know, but over time you develop a sense of what is related to what. Think about it this way...if someone plops a row of trees in front of you, I bet you know which one's a maple and which one's an oak and which one's a pine, maybe you couldn't quote the botanical characteristics that are diffferent, but you know which is which. And going one step further, if you have a bunch of different maples in front of you, I bet you can pick out the Japanese maple. If you haven't spent a lot of time looking at other maples, maybe you can't tell the difference yet between a sugar maple and a Norway maple, or you couldn't distinguish which JM cultivar is which, but if you spend a lot of time looking at maples, you'll undoubtedly start to recognize which is which over time. For me the key thing is spending a lot of time looking at plants, I go to nurseries and botanical gardens a lot, and anytime I see something I don't recognize I always look at the name on the tag. And hanging out in the ID forum here is very educational as well. There may also be a college or university in your area that would offer a plant identification course as part of their horticulture program, so if you're really interested in learning more that's probably the way to go.

For a gross simplification. Individuals within a species can interbreed and have viable offspring. For example different races of humans can interbreed and their children will be fertile. I'd generally say that inter species crosses either can't happen as in the case of chimps and humans or produce sterile off spring such as horses and donkeys which produce sterile mules. I don't know what separates let's say wolves and dogs into separate species even though they can cross breed.

The term used is taxonomy and the man responsible for the modern system is Carl Linnaeus.

Cross-breeding between different species within the same genus is actually a fairly common occurence in the world of plants, it's how many hybrids get created. Sometimes the hybrids are sterile but sometimes they're not, and they can be propagated by cuttings, etc if they do happen to be sterile. Intergeneric hybrids between different genera in the same family are less common but there are still a number of examples (X Chitalpa tashkentis, X Laburnocytisus adamii, X Citrofortunella, and X Chiranthofremontia lenzii are 4 intergeneric hybrids that come to mind off the top of my head but I'm sure there are others as well) I think botanists tend to go more by botanical characteristics for classifying, vs looking at what can interbreed with what.

ecrane, thanks for the two websites.....Not only a great refresher but learned a lot I didn't realize or know.....

Paul from Alabama

Thanks for the links that 1st link was great, the second one was over my head right now but I still book marked it latter. I know that you really do not need to know this type of stuff to ID plants, I can ID animals with out this information.

If you think about it though I can only ID 100-200 animals but there are so many more types of plants. Mind you that I really only want to learn trees at this time. Since there are so many types of trees I just think that it would be easier if I could first tell if a tree was a birch, maple, ect. then decide from there what type it was.

I have a couple of questions...

1) What system is most commonly used in taxonomy?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_systems_of_plant_taxonomy

2) Does anyone know of a good place to find a list of what species are part of what families?

3) Since we talked about it before does anyone know an information about how one "makes" a new cultivation of a plant? To me that is just so interesting.

Every where I look I keep getting different information about classification. It is like there is no standard in this area of science and when each person has a different system it makes it impossible to get good information. Since people can not even decide how how man subclasses there are (10-19 is what I found thus far) then it almost seems like I should just make my own system too...lol.

Plant Files is a great resource for what's in what family--go to the specific search and type whatever family name you're interested in into the family field, and it'll pull up a list of all the plants in PF that are in that family. Or if you look up a particular plant in PF and want to see what else is in that family, just click on the family name near the top of the entry and that'll bring up the rest of the family.

As far as how new cultivars come about--I'd say the two most common are hybridization (can be accidental or intentional) caused by cross pollination of two related plants producing babies that have characteristics different from the parents. Sometimes when you do this, you'll get a plant that has a different flower color, larger flowers, more disease resistance, etc which makes it worth propagating and marketing it as a different plant from the parent. Other times, there are sports, or spontaneous mutations--like an all green plant will throw up a variegated branch for example. Sometimes the mutation is not stable, meaning that if you try and propagate it by cuttings it will revert back to looking like the parent, but sometimes it is stable and can be propagated to make new plants with the variegation (or whatever characteristic the sport had)

I think you're making the whole plant classification thing harder than it needs to be--yes, it can be complicated if you really get into all the details, but for the most part the majority of people agree on a maple being a maple, etc so you can become very knowledgeable about ID'ing plants without ever having to even go near the discussions of people who adhere to various different classification systems, etc. For the vast majority of garden plants the most confusing thing you'll run into is the occasional genus change. I'd really recommend looking into whether a community college or university extension offers a plant identification class, I think that'll be a great place for you to start and you'll learn a lot and see that it's really not as complicated as it might seem. Or there are probably some books on identification which would walk you through the same things you'd learn in the class.