-- Natural History

Armen Takhtajan is among the greatest authorities in the world on the evolution of plants. This book culminates almost sixty years of the scientist's research of the origin and classification of the flowering plants. It presents a continuation of Dr. Takhtajan’s earlier publications including “Systema Magnoliophytorum” (1987), (in Russian), and “Diversity and Classification of Flowering Plants” (1997), (in English). In his latest book, the author presents a concise and significantly revised system of plant classification (‘Takhtajan system’) based on the most recent studies in plant morphology, embryology, phytochemistry, cytology, molecular biology and palynology. Flowering plants are divided into two classes: class Magnoliopsida (or Dicotyledons) includes 8 subclasses, 126 orders, c. 440 families, almost 10,500 genera, and no less than 195,000 species; and class Liliopsida (or Monocotyledons) includes 4 subclasses, 31 orders, 120 families, more than 3,000 genera, and about 65,000 species.This book contains a detailed description of plant orders, and descriptive keys to plant families providing characteristic features of the families and their differences.

This volume, the tenth in the series, comprises modern treatments for the families and genera of the eudicot orders Sapindales and Cucurbitales. The circumscription of the orders, families and genera conforms to the most recent systematic studies. The family treatments include descriptions of the families and the genera, genera classification keys, discussions of relationships and data on their morphology, reproductive biology, distribution, ecology and economic importance. Sapindales and Cucurbitales, as understood in this volume, comprise 16 families with 637 genera and roughly 9,240 species. Sapindales include large tropical and southern temperate tree families such as the Anacardiaceae, Sapindaceae (these in the modern circumscription, which includes Aceraceae and Hippocastanaceae), Meliaceae and Rutaceae, which have long been considered to be closely related. Cucurbitales represent a relatively new ordinal concept; apart from some small woody groups, the order contains two large families, Cucurbitaceae and Begoniaceae, which are predominantly, and likely basically, herbaceous. A detailed treatment of the tropical and southern temperate woody family Myrtaceae (itself comprising 142 genera and 6,700 species) is an addendum to the treatment of the Myrtales in Vol. IX of this series.

The culmination of more than fifty years of research by the foremost living expert on plant classification, Diversity and Classification of Flowering Plants is an important contribution to the field of plant taxonomy. In the last decade, the system of classifying plants has been thoroughly revised. Instead of describing every individual family, Takhtajan includes descriptions in keys to families, which he calls "descriptive keys." The advantage of descriptive keys is that they give both the characteristic features of the families and their differences. The delimitation of families and orders drastically differs from the one accepted by the Englerian school and from the one accepted in Arthur Cronquist's system. Takhtajan favors the smaller, more natural families and orders, which are more coherent and better-defined, where characters are easily grasped, and which are more suitable for information retrieval and phylogenetic studies, including cladistic analysis (because it reduces polymorphic codings).