Armen Takhtajan

Who was Armen Takhtajan?

Armen Leonovich Takhtajan or Takhtajian, was a Soviet-Armenian botanist, one of the most important figures in 20th century plant evolution and systematics and biogeography. His other interests included morphology of flowering plants, paleobotany, and the flora of the Caucasus. He was born in Shusha.

Takhtajan worked at the Komarov Botanical Institute in Leningrad, where he developed his 1940 classification scheme for flowering plants, which emphasized phylogenetic relationships between plants. His system did not become known to botanists in the West until after 1950, and in the late 1950s he began a correspondence and collaboration with the prominent American botanist Arthur Cronquist, whose plant classification scheme was heavily influenced by his collaboration with Takhtajan and other botanists at Komarov.

The "Takhtajan system" of flowering plant classification treats flowering plants as a division, Magnoliophyta, with two classes, Magnoliopsida and Liliopsida. These two classes are subdivided into subclasses, and then superorders, orders, and families. The Takhtajan system is similar to the Cronquist system, but with somewhat greater complexity at the higher levels. He favors smaller orders and families, to allow character and evolutionary relationships to be more easily grasped. The Takhtajan classification system remains influential; it is used, for example, by the Montréal Botanical Garden.