Gardeners, I think it’s fair to say, have a fairly fraught relationship with plant taxonomy. Botanists want the way plants are classified and named to reflect our best understanding of their evolutionary relationships. Gardeners just wish they would leave well enough alone.
In recent years, the whole subject has been revolutionised, in part, by our ability to look directly at plant DNA, which has often revealed that some of our earlier ideas weren’t quite right, and that plants’ names need to change.
Aster
But change how? Sometimes we need new names, and a good example When Carl Linnaeus was handing out our modern Latin binomial names, he picked the European aster as the ‘type’ species of his new genus and called it .
