Editing Liliaceae (section)

=== History ===
The family Liliaceae was described by [[Michel Adanson]] in 1763 and formally named by [[Antoine Laurent de Jussieu]] in 1789. Jussieu defined this grouping as having a [[Calyx (botany)|calyx]] of six equal colored parts, six [[stamens]], a superior [[Ovary (botany)|ovary]], single [[Style (botany)|style]], and a trilocular (three-chambered) [[Capsule (botany)|capsule]]. By 1845, [[John Lindley]], the first English [[systematist]], unhappily acknowledged the great diversity in the [[circumscription (taxonomy)|circumscription]] of the family, and that it had expanded vastly, with many subdivisions. As he saw it, the Liliaceae were already [[paraphyletic]] ("catch-all"), being all [[Liliales]] not included in the other orders, but hoped that the future would reveal some characteristic that would group them better. He recognized  133 genera and 1200 species.<ref name=Lindley2/> By the time of the next major British classification – that of [[Bentham and Hooker]] in 1883 (published in Latin) – several of Lindley's other families had already been absorbed into the Liliaceae.<ref name=BandH/> Over time the family became increasingly broad and somewhat arbitrarily defined as all species of plants with six tepals and a superior ovary, eventually coming to encompass about 300&nbsp;genera and 4,500&nbsp;species within the [[Order (biology)|order]] [[Liliales]] under the [[Cronquist system]] (1981). Cronquist merged the Liliaceae with the [[Amaryllidaceae]], making this one of the largest monocotyledon families.<ref name="Cronquist 1981"/>

Many other botanists echoed Lindley's earlier concerns about the [[phylogeny]] of the Liliaceae, but various schemes to divide the family gained little traction. [[Dahlgren system|Dahlgren]] (1985) suggested there were in fact forty – not one – families distributed over three orders (predominantly [[Liliales]] and [[Asparagales]]).<ref name="Walters and Keil"/><ref name=Kelch/> In the context of a general review of the classification of [[angiosperms]], the Liliaceae were subjected to more intense scrutiny. Considerable progress in plant phylogeny and [[phylogenetic]] theory enabled a [[phylogenetic tree]] to be constructed for all of the flowering plants, as elaborated by the [[Angiosperm Phylogeny Group]] (1998).<ref name="Patterson 2002"/>