Asparagaceae

Asparagaceae is a family that only exists in its present shape because of DNA. For most of botanical history its members were filed in half a dozen separate families, and anybody who learned plants before about 2009 learned them that way. The reshuffle put hyacinths, lily of the valley, bluebells, ruscus and the agaves under one roof, which still looks odd on paper and makes complete sense once you know what they share.

A family assembled by evidence, not by eye

Nothing about a hyacinth obviously belongs with a yucca. They were grouped because sequencing showed a shared ancestry that appearance had hidden, and the older classifications, which sorted plants by what they looked like, had scattered them across families named after each obvious type.

Older books will call these Hyacinthaceae, Convallariaceae, Ruscaceae, Agavaceae and several more. None of those names is wrong so much as superseded, and you will still meet all of them on labels and in supplier catalogs. It is worth recognizing them rather than assuming an error.

The name is a small joke of the same kind. The family is named for asparagus, which is the vegetable, because that was the earliest validly published name in the group. The ornamental members inherited a greengrocer's name through nothing but the rules of botanical priority.

The greenery is the long game

The most commercially useful member of this family is not a flower at all. Ruscus is the dark, stiff, glossy green in more bouquets than any other single foliage, and it lasts three to four weeks in water, longer than anything it is likely to be arranged with.

Its structure is worth knowing because it explains the durability. What look like leaves on a ruscus stem are not leaves. They are flattened stems called cladodes, doing the work of leaves with far tougher tissue, which is why they neither wilt nor drop. On the butcher's broom you can sometimes see a tiny flower sitting in the middle of one of these false leaves, which is a giveaway no true leaf would ever offer.

Solomon's seal earns its place for the same reason, arching stems that hold their shape and their leaves for a week or more and give a line that is hard to get any other way.