Monographing plants

In large, complex plant groups, such as this bugloss from the Canary Islands, making scientific decisions about the description of new species and synthesising data for multiple sources, of varying quality, requires information to be filtered, compared and evaluated. 
Morison set a standard for doing this. Not the Historia, but in the Plantarum umbelliferarum distributio nova (1672), where he presents a detailed analysis of a single, taxonomically defined group of plants – the carrot family.

A stage was set for the evolution of the taxonomic monograph, where all knowledge about a discrete group of plants is collected, critically reviewed, and synthesised to draw conclusions about the diversity of life on earth. The monograph has become the gold standard in taxonomic botany although, as Morison discovered, they may take academic lifetimes – or more – to complete and get published (Muñoz-Rodríguez et al., 2019).

Reference

Muñoz-Rodríguez P, Carruthers T, Wood JRI, Williams BRM, Weitemier K, Kronmiller B, Goodwin Z, Sumadijaya A, Anglin NL, Filer D, Harris D, Rausher MD, Kelly S, Liston A and Scotland RW 2019. A taxonomic monograph of Ipomoea integrated across phylogenetic scales. Nature Plants 5: 1136-1144.