Plants

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In the first edition from 1996 of the book, which was a forerunner of this database, I had used a taxonomy basing on the „Schmeil-Fitschen“ (s.Lit.) – at that time one of the foremost reference works in Germany – which I found fitting best to our homeopathic purposes. In the meantime the systematics of plants was revised several times and is still in process. So I will now re-order the whole structure of flowering plants according to the nowadays most used system, which is the one of Cronquist. (I know that the APG system according to DNA similarities will in ten or twenty years be the best and only surviving system, but at the moment it is still immature and cannot put into the order many plant families that are important for us. So I will for a while stick to the „old order" and just give a short table of the APG.)

But what do we do with the ideas of families and similarities of groups that are considered not to be as related any more as we thought before? The point is that the older systems didn´t make their connections arbitrarily or at random but because of very close biological or morphological similarities that they observed. So the relatedness between those group that we now know are not phylogentically related lies in their similar way to survive or build structures („convergent evolution“ as biology says) and so is as important for us homeopaths as the phylogentic order.

To give a rough overview I first give the general structure of the flowering plants down to their orders completely plus those families that we use for homoeopathic remedies. There are also added the „families“ (actually different taxonomic groups) that Rajan Sankaran uses for his systematic approach given in „Insight into Plants“.