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Interactive
key to the genera of Lamiaceae
Nina Davies, Gemma Bramley & Don Kirkup
The interactive
key to the genera of the Lamiaceae (Mint) family
is an identification aid for use by both amateurs and
professionals.
The Lamiaceae, or mint family, is
the 7th largest flowering plant family,
and includes many well-known plants, herbs, shrubs and trees of
horticultural, economic and medicinal importance. It
is made up of about 7200 species, organised into 236 genera.
Members of the Lamiaceae range from small
plants that you can find in your back garden, to herbs commonly used in
cooking, like Basils ( Ocimum
L.), to well-known shrubs like Lavender ( Lavandula
L.), to the huge rain forest tree used in the timber industry, Tectona
grandis L.f., commonly known as
teak. They can even be woody climbers, like Congea
tomentosa
Roxb. ,
occasionally grown in tropical gardens
The key has
been designed for ease of use; in keeping with this, the
character set has been kept to a minimum. In light
of this, it is common that when using the key to identify a specimen, a
number of possible genera, rather than one, will be listed
after scoring the relevant characters. It should then be
possible to correctly identify the specimen by narrowing down the
subset of genera listed: to further enable identification, detailed
information on each genus in the Lamiaceae
is provided in a handy fact sheet.
Genus fact
sheets
provide nomenclatural information, a description, images
(either live or dried specimens), geographical distribution, and major
publications. They can be accessed by clicking on the 'page'
icon next to each genus. Descriptions are based on the
account of the Lamiaceae
by Harley et al. (2004). Nomenclature has been extracted from
the draft World Checklist of Lamiaceae,
produced by Rafael Govaerts
at RBG Kew (http://apps.kew.org/wcsp/lamiaceae/). The
geographical distribution of each genus was derived from the
draft Checklist, specimen information and Brummitt's
families and genera of vascular plants (currently not accessible
outside RBG Kew). Any herbarium specimens imaged belong to Kew's
collections.
Character
fact sheets provide images and written definitions of each
character state. They can be accessed by clicking on the
'page' icon next to each character.
This is a work
in progress, and your feedback and suggestions are welcome.
Please send any comments to Gemma Bramley, Herbarium,
Library, Art & Archives, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, TW9 3AB, UK.
References
Harley
RM, Atkins S, Budantsev
AL, Cantino PD, Conn
BJ, Grayer R, Harley
MM, de Kok RPJ, Krestovskaja T, Morales R, Paton
AJ, Ryding O, and Upson T. 2004. Labiatae, in The Families and
Genera of Vascular Plants (K. Kubitzki,
ed. in chief) VI: 167-275. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, New
York.
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