One of the features I have enjoyed on recent episodes of Gardeners’ World has been Carol Klein’s ongoing review of plant families. These botanical groupings have key commonalities but also contain huge diversity.

I have realised that I can explore this through tagging the photos I have taken with not just genus, species and cultivar (the above flowers would get tagged “erigeron”, “erigeron karvinskianus”, “mexican flea-bane” when posted to Flickr) but also with the family name. That will give me a series of tag-based albums which will let me see related plants clustered together. For example, the Rosaceae family includes roses (Rosa) but also apple trees (the Malus genus) and the ornamental Kerria genus.

I am using machine tags as a way of doing this, adopting the plantdb schema I found someone else had used (plantdb:family=familyname). You can see all my family-tagged photos here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wulf/tags/plantdb:family=*/

or pick up that Rosaceae family here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wulf/tags/plantdb:family=rosaceae/