I agree with Leo's basic idea, and think it's good for this group. Another similar approach would be to use the designations s.s. and s.l. with these family names. This came up a few weeks ago in one of Joe Shaw's postings. For those of you who don't remember that exchange, s.s. = "in the narrow sense" and s.l. = "in the broad sense". People who like to speculate about relationships like these designations because they sidestep the philosophical problems evoked by rigid family assignments and, just as importantly in many discussions, they indicate a beginning point and an ending point when things start to move around. And of course they also provide diplomatic wiggle room when the going gets hot. Because these new family assignments often represent not so much a newly established relationship as a finer granularity of existing representations of relationship, citing both the former and the more recent ideas about relationships will help to keep everyone on the same page. And once more people loosen up about this and realize that these family assignments are not an objective reality but rather informed opinions, then we gardeners might stop worrying about getting it exactly "right". Nearly fifty years ago I acquired a copy of Hutchinson's Families of Flowering Plants (I have the 1960 reprint of the second edition; the work was first published in 1934). That was my introduction to the splitting up of the old Liliaceae into numerous smaller groups (Hutchinson called many of them tribes) whose members were obviously more closely related. I paid careful attention to these and learned a lot. I would never have known about the genus Semele but for Hutchinson's grouping it with its relatives Danae and Ruscus. This could go on and on. I definitely think there is something to be said for indicating familial relationships at several levels of exactitude, and for getting away from the notion that these family assignments are objective realities. Has anyone else ever noticed how when one travels in rural areas of the country, the young people often still effect styles which long ago were supplanted by newer styles in the big urban areas? There is something similar to that happening with writers: as one moves further away from the primary literature of taxonomy, one is more likely to encounter old, now discredited beliefs about relationships. To this day, writers about food are likely to assign the onions to the "lily family", a style which went out of fashion in the fast lane generations ago. We've come a long way since Hutchinson's groupings back then - or maybe I should say some have come a long way. And here we are, still earnestly discussing some of the groupings stated in Hutchinson so long ago. If nothing else, perhaps there is some solace to be had in knowing that backwards as we've been all this time, it really hasn't hurt us a bit. Hmmmm....what are those folks at the back of the lecture hall snickering about? Jim McKenney jimmckenney@jimmckenney.com Montgomery County, Maryland, USA, USDA zone 7 My Virtual Maryland Garden http://www.jimmckenney.com/ Webmaster Potomac Valley Chapter, NARGS Editor PVC Bulletin http://www.pvcnargs.org/Bulletins/ Webmaster Potomac Lily Society http://www.potomaclilysociety.org/