Classification of Plants

Just as an unsorted library makes finding one book take hours, while books shelved by genre make it a ten-minute job, the vast assemblage of plants in the world is unstudiable unless it is organised. Classification is the scientific basis for cataloguing and retrieving information about that diversity - it is a human INVENTION, built by biologists from the best available evidence, that arranges organisms into groups based on their similarities, dissimilarities and relationships, so as to express those relationships systematically. Taxonomists assign this arrangement into hierarchical ranks, and the whole scheme must stay flexible enough to accommodate newly discovered organisms wherever they best fit. …