Students who are beginning the study of forestry in college soon learn they have to identify and memorize the names of numerous trees. If that weren’t hard enough, most colleges require them to know ...

For two years in the late 1970s I followed in the footsteps of Carl Linnaeus: I toiled in the field of taxonomy. The small corner of nature's jigsaw puzzle that I tackled was a group of marine sponges ...

But in the 1730s, the self-proclaimed “prince of botany” made a contribution to taxonomy that, at the time, was just as profound as any of his other achievements. After realizing that floral sex parts ...