Succulents and More™

As Bob Dylan once said, “There is nothing so stable as change.” That’s true for a lot of things, but especially for taxonomy. Many people hate it when the botanical names they’ve painstakingly learned become something else. Others embrace it as a corollary of progress. Me, I’m OK with it as long as there’s a good reason. A big brouhaha ensued when in 2014 five new genera were split off the genus Aloe : Aloiampelos, Aloidendron, Aristaloe, Gonialoe , and Kumara . This wasn’t some random flight of fancy, but the result of molecular studies that shed new light on the evolutionary origin of what we call aloes. Now something similar is happening to agaves, although on a smaller scale. A couple of months ago (January 2024), a team of Mexican botanists published an article titled “New Genera and New Combinations in Agavaceae” in which they propose three new genera based on genetics, morphology, and the estimated time they diverged from the common ancestor of all agaves. I know, this is stuf...

Taxonomists—scientists describing, naming and classifying organisms—love change. They are constantly assigning and reassigning plants (and animals) based on the latest research findings. The decisions they make often annoy gardeners: After all, why is it necessary to move a plant that has always been one thing into another bucket, causing its botanical name to change? Sometimes these things seem haphazard, but I’m sure they’re always scientifically motivated. Or at least I hope so. Most of the time the work taxonomists do attracts little attention among the gardening crowd, myself included. However, when an entire group of plants I’m fond of is affected, my ears do perk up. Case in point: the recent reclassification of the genus Aloe . Molecular studies suggest that not all aloe species have the same evolutionary origin and hence are less closely related than previously thought. Based on those findings, some species have been separated from the genus Aloe and moved into their genus....