Classification is a natural human propensity—we organize our clothes, our kitchen cupboards, and our toys. This applies to the natural world, too, where animals and plants are grouped based on ...

Taxonomy: it is a word that suggests a scientific approach to naming organisms and then to classifying them into convenient groups. The ancient Greeks, for a time, thought that all the plants of the ...

Mr. Langellier is a writer and field botanist in Vermont. In 2009, the botanist Naomi Fraga was hunting a flower without a name near Carson City, Nev. Ms. Fraga saw that the plant was going extinct in ...