Your herb garden and the teak tree belong to the same plant family
Basil, rosemary, thyme and lavender are all members of the mint family, Lamiaceae, along with chia and catnip. So, less obviously, is teak, a timber tree. With roughly seven thousand species worldwide, the family is enormous, and most of its genera have still never had their DNA sampled.
The older name, Labiatae, describes the flowers: five fused petals typically form an upper and a lower lip, from the Latin labia. Most botanists now prefer Lamiaceae, though both remain acceptable. The flowers are bilaterally symmetrical and often packed into what look like whorls but are really two crowded clusters. Leaves usually grow in opposite pairs, each pair turned at right angles to the one below. Square stems are a famous clue, but not every member has them and some unrelated plants do.
Most species are herbaceous, many are aromatic, and a large share are easy to root from stem cuttings, which helps explain why so many end up in gardens. Some are grown for seeds, as with chia, a species of Salvia; others for tubers, like the Chinese artichoke; and others purely for show, like coleus. Salvia is the biggest genus, with around 900 species, followed by skullcaps in Scutellaria.
Counts vary with the source. The family spans about 236 genera and between 6,900 and 7,200 species, while the World Checklist of Selected Plant Families puts the tally at 7,534 and Plants of the World Online accepts 224 genera. Boundaries keep moving. In the 1990s, DNA studies shifted many genera out of the related verbena family and into Lamiaceae. Clerodendrum, once over 400 species, had been cut to about 150 by 2010 as pieces were split off into separate genera.
The last full revision, in 2004, recognised seven subfamilies plus ten genera that fitted none of them, among them teak's genus Tectona and the beautyberries of Callicarpa. By 2026 the APG system recognised 12 subfamilies, finding homes for those orphans; teak now sits in a subfamily of its own. Recent studies using large chloroplast gene datasets have largely agreed on how the subfamilies relate.
Source: Lamiaceae
