Learn about the family

Despite the topic I've chosen to write on, I'm not a big fan of genealogy. I don't know how many times I've had this conversation, where an older relative implies that I might be distantly related to Billy the Kid, or Abraham Lincoln, or the second cousin of a former chef for the King of Belgium or something.
Is it supposed to mean something to me? Even if true, is my tenuous distant relationship to someone noteworthy from history supposed to give me reason to feel that I'm special?

And, by the way, if you go back far enough -- and it's really not even that far -- everyone is related to everyone. Heck, we're all hominids, right?

I suppose it's all in good fun, but if I'm looking for something useful in genetic information, it'd be best to look at something much more specific (like the history of heart disease or breast cancer in the last couple of generations of my family), or much more general. It's probably more useful to know what I have in common with other humans, other primates, other mammals, and even with animals going right back to starfish and sponges than it is to track down the exploits of some distant relative who fought in the battle of 1812.

Until I took some courses in plant identification, I hadn't really applied the same logic to members of the greener kingdom. But every time I learned a plant, the profs insisted that I also learn the family. Rosaceae. Ranunculaceae. Ay ay ay!

The reason, of course, that they insist on students learning all of this botanical latin is that there are family characteristics - things in common between members of the family. These common traits are useful in identifying unknown plants, but also in decisions on how to use and combine plants.

So in this post, I'll go through a few of the more common plant families in the garden. You might decide to bug out right here, but then you wouldn't learn anything interesting about the stems of members of the mint family, or the reason why you don't find members of the buttercup family in many soup recipes.

First, meet the bean family, Fabaceae:

But wait... those look like branches. This is Cercis occidentalis, a bonafide member of the bean family. Many plant families include annuals, perennials, shrubs, and trees. They can include tender and hardy plants. So, in other words, individuals within a family can seemingly have very little in common with each other. Look closer (especially at the flowers) and you'll find the family resemblance.

Being kind of an amateur, I find myself personifying the families a bit - probably as a device to jog my memory. I think of the bean family as a hardworking clan.

You'll find the Fabacaea family slaving away in the poorest soils, improving it by enlisting bacteria to harvest atmospheric nitrogen. You'll find these plants in some of the toughest environments... from lupins growing in high alpine areas, to mesquite trees surviving in the desert by sending down a deep taproot.

It's hard to fault the bean family for being invasive. Rampant vines like wisteria and kudzu are just doing their jobs - and extremely succesfully!

Of course, you'll find regular old garden variety beans in the family, along with peas, peanuts, and the industrious soybean, which is hard not to find on your food labels, in one form or another.

To continue with the personification of plant families, I'll say this: if the bean family is quietly industrious, the rose family is full of show-offs.

Here's a picture of Spirea x. 'Goldflame' from my garden. That's bleeding heart (Dicentra spectabilis) in the foreground. Even in early leaf, it's easy to see the family tendency to grab attention. Whether it's a shrub rose, so heavy with flowers it can hardly keep it's canes off the ground, or a cherry tree fully obscured by a cloud of pink blossoms in the spring, members of Rosaceae don't do anything without making a fuss about it.

So many of our fruit and ornamental plants are from this family, it's easy to plant a whole garden without much family diversity without realizing it: Plums. Apples. Saskatoons. Hawthorn. Cotoneaster. Lady's Mantle. Strawberries. Raspberries. Almonds. Ninebark.

While the himalayan blackberry is definitely grabbing up more than its share of real estate in these parts, it's hard to stay mad at a plant which colours my girls faces purple with a prolific crop of berries every summer.

If the bean family works hard, and the rose family struts its stuff, meet one of the bad boys of the plant world: Solanaceae.

Deadly nightshade. Solanum dulcamara.This is a common weed in our area, and as you could guess from the name, it's a tad on the toxic side. I'm using the image (under creative commons license) from a pest management website, IPM Images.Good site, BTW, for information on plant pests of all sorts.

So which garden plants are from the nightshade family. Oh, how about tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, and eggplants? On the ornamental side, this family produces petunias, daturas and chinese lantern plants.

And just to cement the bad-boy image, this family includes tobacco as well.

Why would we eat or smoke products from a plant family which produces toxic alkaloids? I won't speak to the smoking bit, but on the food side, domesticated members of the nightshade family have been selectively bred to reduce or remove the toxins from the parts we eat. So you can enjoy your spicy hot chicken wings with all the hot pepper sauce you want... and aside from perhaps a little indigestion, you probably won't come away with serious health consequences.

Despite the bad-boy image I'm slapping on the nightshade family, it has proven to be very useful to man. In addition to the food plants I've mentioned, members of this family have been used extensively in medicine.

The toxins, I've read, help to defend the plants in this family from herbivory. Another plant family that I'll discuss here also has a special way of defending itself: the mint family does it with aromatic oils.

This is a picture of bee balm (monarda) - the photo is by Keith Haessly. Bee balm is a member of the mint family. Every time I handle this plant at work, I'm hit in the face by its minty smell. Okay, I promised to say something (semi) interesting about the stems of mint family members. Look at the photo. Imagine that you're taking the stem below the flower between your thumb and forefinger. Now, if you tried to roll the stem along your thumb, you'd find that it's not round, but square - which you can just about see in the photo.

That stem being square in the cross-section is a characteristic I use to identify members of the family. Most also have a strong scent as well, although it's not always overtly "minty".

Many herbs are in the mint family. There's basil, oregano, rosemary, lemon balm, lavender, hyssop, sage, thyme, savory - just about the entire spice rack. In the way that the rose family is showy to the eyes, the mint family is showy to the nose and taste buds.

A couple of interesting things to know about using mint relatives in the garden:

1) The fact that they're so aromatic actually helps to keep down pest insect populations.
2) Most, but not all, spread rapidly below ground. Unless you contain them, they can really take over in the garden. Now if you happen to be looking for a plant to take over some empty space (and crowd out the weeds) this can be a very good thing. If you've placed it in an alpine garden, right next to your prized gentians, well...

Now, so far, every plant family I've mentioned has been fairly useful to humans. They include some major food crops, herbs, medicinal plants, and they include plants that look great in the garden as well. The fact that these plants are such good neighbors to humans has secured their places in our farms and gardens. We breed them, we tend them, and wherever humans have settled, these plants are with us.

(On an aside, author Michael Pollan has an interesting clip on TED where he looks at these human/plant relationships - from the plant's point of view. Are we using them, or are they using us?)

I wanted to mention one more plant that isn't quite of the same character. The buttercup family, Ranunculaceae, doesn't really pander to human needs the way these other families have. If I'm going to lend a character to the family, I'd say that the buttercup clan is selfishly indifferent to the needs of the human race.

This is a picture of autumn monkshood (Aconitum carmichaelii) coming up in my back garden. Actually, it's a lot taller now, but I haven't had a chance to write for a while. I chose to show this plant because the leaves actually look a lot like those of a common buttercup - if you cock your head to the left a bit and squint - c'mon people, work with me here! The flowers don't look much like a buttercup, but that's another story.

There are no important food crops from buttercup relatives, primarily because they'd likely kill you. Just about the entire family is poisonous to humans and livestock.

In the garden, buttercup family members are strong competitors. Some, like columbine, self-seed readily and pop up everywhere. Some, like clematis, scramble up through and over other plants. I have a Clematis montana which is currently working hard at killing an alder tree in my back yard, pulling down entire branches under the weight of its leaves. Some, like western bleeding heart (Dicentra exima) spread aggressively underground when they find a spot they like.

Members of this family are not known as particularly good companion plants. They like a good rich soil, but will apparently kill off soil improving bacteria to keep competitors from the bean family from moving in.

Selfishly indifferent. But pretty. Members of this family make up some of the more attractive garden plants. There are delphiniums, bleeding hearts, anemones, hellebores, trollius, meadow rue, and the ever-so-striking cimicifuga.

There are loads of other important garden plant families, but I need to stop. To make another family analogy, it's a bit like making the guest list for a wedding - difficult to know where to stop. If I write about the sunflower family (Asteraceae), I really should include the carrot family (Apiaceae) - but if I include the carrot family, the mustard family (Brassicaceae) deserves a mention.

If you're really into gardening, though, and you haven't given much attention to the plant families, I'd really encourage you to learn about a few of them. If you don't want to jump in and take a plant ID course, there are still a number of other good resources out there. Some of the better gardening books list the family name right next to the latin name of the plant. Or throw some of your favourite plants onto wikipedia, and then click through to the family (usually in the first line of the plant description).

Okay. Done. Sorry it's been a while since I posted last. I was trying to survive spring shipping season for my first year in a wholesale nursery. I'm happy to report that I'm still employed, still married to a very patient girl, and I'm finally (beginning) to catch up on my weeding.