Taxonomy
The family name is based on the genus Iris, the largest and best known genus in Europe. Iris dates from 1753, when it was named by Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus. Its name derives from the Greek goddess, Iris, who carried messages from Olympus to earth along a rainbow, whose colors were seen by Linnaeus in the multi-hued petals of many of the species. The family name is attributed to Antoine Laurent de Jussieu's 1789 Genera Plantarum, secundum ordines naturales disposita juxta methodum in Horto Regio Parisiensi exaratam, and is a conserved name, so that even if an earlier name were to be discovered for the family, Iridaceae would remain valid.
The family has been accepted in all major classification systems of the 20th century. The Cronquist system treated it as part of the order Liliales of the subclass Liliidae, the Takhtajan system placed it in an order Iridales, together with Isophysidaceae and Geosiridaceae treated as single-genus families, and the Thorne system treated it as part of the order Orchidales in its own suborder, Iridineae. The Angiosperm Phylogeny Group in 1998 and 2003 (APG and APG II, respectively) system of flowering plant classification organizes flowering plants into a "selected number of monophyletic suprafamilial groups" and placed Iridaceae in the order Asparagales, which was part of a clade called "Non Commelinoid Monocots".
Read more about this topic: Iridaceae