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Flowering plant

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The Magnoliophyta are a division of plants distinguished by the presence of flowers. They are also called the Anthophyta or Angiospermata, but in modern botany groups are always named after their type genus, in this case Magnolia.

See also flowers, fruit, vegetables, herbs, spices, trees, and so forth.

Systematics

The most prevalent classification of flowers still seems to be that from the 1981 work An Integrated System of Classification of Flowering Plants, by Arthur Cronquist. More recently many of the groupings have been questioned, and revised schemes, often quite different, have been proposed, largely based on ideas from cladistics (for a discussion of the difficulties see the copyrighted article Taxonomy, Classification, and the Debate about Cladistics at http://artemis.austinc.edu/acad/bio/gdiggs/taxonomy.html). Here Judd et al. are mostly being followed as one of the most prevalent of these, but hopefully notes on differences between the various classification schemes wherever posible.

The most prominent split among the flowers is between the dicots and monocots. The names come from the number of leaves present within the seed, called cotyledons. Several other differences between the two groups should be mentioned here. Typically the dicots are grouped as the class Magnoliopsida and the monocots as the class Liliopsida (in some older texts, Dicotyledonae and Monocotyledonae).

Findings suggest that the dicot condition is primitive, and a few orders of dicots, grouped as the subclass Magnoliidae in the old scheme, may be no more closely related to the others (called eudicots) than they are to the monocots. The relationships between these basal groups is uncertain. These are as follows:

An unfortunate difficulty with the system of botanical nomenclature is that if these are not classified with the eudicots, the name Magnoliopsida would not apply to the group, since Magnolia would not be a member.

Monocots (Liliopsida)

Eudicots

Note: Classification of dicots varies considerably under different schemes. See Magnoliopsida for Cronquist's system, which includes the forms here considered basal flowers.

Non-core eudicots

Core eudicots


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