To simplify the finding of certain plant families within the different systems and to get an overview over the changes within the relationships of families and orders, we have devised a few lists in pdf format.
They only include such orders and families that are in current homeopathic use.
You will find the same content of the tables arranged after different points of view: according to the older system of Cronquist, to the genetically based system APG, simply alphabetically.
1. the System according to Cronquist (with its changes to the APG III)
2. the System according to APG III (with its changes to Cronquist)
3. a simple alphabetical listing of the families for a quick browsing
4. a table of the families according to Sankaran (with their allocations in the actual taxonomy).
On this page we are following the „families“ (actually different kinds of taxonomic groups) as Rajan Sankaran uses them in his systematic approach that is laid out in his “Insight into Plants”. There Sankaran is mainly following the systematic order of the first edition of my book “The Natural System of Remedies” from 1997, so an older taxonomy, that has been completely revised and is neither identical with Cronquist nor with APG as both only became prominent later. Therefore these “families” have always to be treated seperately. Nevertheless the changes towards a genetically based systematic are mainly relevant for the work with the sensation method as the Hamamelidae, the Violales, the Geraniales und the Theales are concerned, which have all been scattered into completely different taxons.
Refining and Updating the System: You will find the latest developements and new suggestions for attributions of miasms in our plant families as used in the sensation method here.
In the first edition from 1997 of the book, which was a forerunner of this database, I had used a taxonomy based 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 have now re-ordered the whole structure of flowering plants according to the nowadays most used system, which is the one of Cronquist.
I am sure that within ten or twenty years the APG system according to DNA similarities will be the best and only surviving systematics, but at the moment it is still immature and not able to allocate several of the plant families at all. At the time being the third version of this table (APG III) is valid but it is still not complete and will see many further changes. So I will for a while stick to the „old order" and give extensive systematic tables for the latest developements, see above.
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. I found it interesting to see that the Israelite homoeopath and botanist Michal Yakir draws the same conclusions when building her plant systematics (see the book "Wondrous Order") and also uses the older, morphologically arranged systematics of Cronquist.
Our colleague Philippe Barthelet kindly gave us a table for publication that compares the tables according to Michal Yakir with the plant system according to Jan Scholten. You will find it here.