Vegetables: Vegetable Classification

There are a number of ways in which vegetables can be classified. Botanists and horticulturists use a taxonomic system founded by the eighteenth-century Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus to describe the genetic relationship between vegetables. In plant taxonomy, as in animal taxonomy, the basic unit is the species. The species defines those plants that breed only with each other. One level above the species is the genus (plural: genera), which comprises numerous related species. Genera, in turn, fit within a family that possesses similar broad characteristics. The common potato, Solanum tuberosum, for instance, belongs to the Solanaceae, or nightshade, family, which counts tobacco, potato, and petunia among its members. (All these plants have simple alternate leaves and five flower petals fused into a tube.) The first part of the scientific name for potato, Solanum, refers to the genus. The second, tuberosum, refers to the species.