Families

Funny how things run in families, freckles, blue eyes, an overwhelming love of cake etc etc.

Now don’t tell anyone, but when I was younger and Botanists talked about plant classification I was never terribly interested. I could see the sense in Latin names, its very useful when you find a plant on the internet, on say a Dutch or French website. I am not fluent in either French or Dutch so for me, if I see the Latin name I know at least we should be talking about the same plant.

The RHS say “Although families may appear at first to be of only academic interest, knowledge of the family to which an unknown plant belongs is the springboard to identifying it, and for the gardener, it can give an indication of the conditions required for successful cultivation.”

However, funnily enough, I have had a bit of a light bulb moment, (not an LED moment more of a 20watt moment) when it comes to plant families today.

I thought I would take my camera into the garden and take a few photo`s of what’s in or coming into flower as a bit of a pictorial diary.

It struck me that some of them shared more than the odd similarity and so I did a bit of “Who Do You Think You Are” research and yes they do belong to the same family.*

So as the year progresses I have decided to continue my photo diary and see how many different family groups I actually have in my garden.

* In case you were wondering, the family group here are Asparagaceae.