On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 11:10 AM, <totototo@telus.net> wrote: > It's time for the botanists to pull their act together and start > legislating, > instead of the current everyman-for-himself approach. The problem as I see it goes beyond botanists. Taxonomists in general are very highly opinionated with their "group". When they try to come together, there's usually a hot debate due to the highly opinionated foundation of the field. For certain questions, it's important to have a higher classification, but for the end user (gardeners and non-taxonomists alike), the species unit is the least artificial. But even at that level, there are still hot debates on what constitute a species. It is clear in the age of genomics is that a single species concept cannot be used to encompass all living things. Nhu Berkeley, CA - it's about to rain, finally!