Language: Bilingual in English and Slovene
Floral formulas are only a part of what people used to organise the seemingly limitless number of plants, thereby more easily remembering their characteristics. Classification and compartmentalisation are nothing new. Knowledge has always been conveyed by first being ordered, because it was then easier to pass on.
With the growing development of botany, tendencies for maximisation of abstraction and a scientific approach to the study of plants also appeared. Floral formulas are reliably the best example of abstraction, since they abandon all things irrelevant and are trying to summarise all the main features, written with just a few letters, characters, and numbers for each family. The floral formula is the simplest way to describe the structure of a flower in a particular species or higher taxonomic group. Nowadays, floral formulas are also useful for three dimensional modelling of the flower structure. This book brings together floral formulas of plant families found in the University Botanic Gardens in Ljubljana.