dave said:...
People want to talk about a plant type in general (leaving comments that are applicable to all tomatoes, for example) so you create a catch-all entry in the database for that plant, but then you have all the other entries for all the cultivars.
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But the main plant entry should have additional features. For one, it can be made into more of an encyclopedia entry, with a free form field for an article-length description of the plant.
That sounds REALLY good to me. If I understand, you are creating a special record for a species-with-no-cultivar.
Is this generalizable?
Could there be a special entry for the genus-with-no-species? The idea of article-length or encyclopedia-entry-length, link-rich contributions for "Salvia" or "Penstemon" or "Iris" would make me dance with glee.
I can imagine that such "genus articles" would rapidly become collaborations as people make suggestions, merge their contributions, and link to other online articles.
Generalizing it to the Family level might be carrying it too far, and I think you've said that "Family" classifications are too volatile to be easily tracked. That seems more literally to be a collection of scholarly articles than database entires.
