Towards an anthropology of plant names Part 7: Discovering families

This article tracks the history of taxonomy back to the ancient Greek scholars Aristotle and Theophrastus, who first classified animals and plants respectively. Theophrastus arrived at the following four large classes, which were in use up until the Renaissance in the 16th century: the ‘trees’, the ‘shrubs’, the ‘under-shrubs’ and the ‘grasses’. It then explores how modern human beings have always made sense of the world by assembling similar-looking objects into groups. Exploring a practice that is unknowingly participated in by everyone from an early age and that we ascribe professionally to those who work in the branch of biology which focusses on the classification of living things and to a discipline we call taxonomy.