The produce aisle, if you look at it kindly, is a soap opera. Tomatoes are glaring at potatoes (both nightshades, family disagreements long and storied), parsley is whispering to cilantro (carrot clan, all elbows and aroma), and grasses are running the cereal empire with suspicious efficiency and no petals to speak of. It is all vastly more related than it looks. Without a system, it’s botanical snow—pretty, drifting, and useless. With taxonomy, it snaps into a picture you can actually read.

Every Tuesday, I’ll give you a small superpower: how to spot plant families in roughly the time it takes to choose an avocado. Market, garden, roadside verge—same trick. You’ll learn why some lookalikes are merely flattering and why others are the sort of cousins you don’t want in your soup.

We’ll start with the sensible question: why family traits matter at all. Then, one family a week: the telltale bits (petal fusions, stamen headcounts, where the ovary is hiding), where you meet them in daily life (food, medicine, weeds), the lookalikes that lead you astray, and one DNA plot twist that made botanists sigh and redraw the map.

Think of Taxonomy Tuesday as a friendly guide to the green family tree—useful, mildly surprising, and just orderly enough to make the outdoors intelligible without cancelling the fun.

Let’s bring order to the green chaos.

1. Botanical Names Explained: How and Why Plants Get Their Scientific Names 

2.  Genus vs. Species: What Really Separates Them?

3. Flowers Don't Lie: Reading the Secret Blueprint of Plant Families