<P> Pliny the Elder made frequent use of Theophrastus, including his books on plants, in his Natural History; the only authors he cited more often were Democritus and Varro . </P> <P> John Scarborough comments that "The list of herbals assembled in Historia Plantarum IX became the direct ancestor of all later drug treatises in antiquity, and many traces of Theophrastus's (and Diocles's) original observations survive in the Materia Medica of Dioscorides . The analysis of the various plants and plant derivatives shows that the Greek rhizotomoi and drug - vendors had collected much valuable information on the medical employment of plants, and Theophrastus invented a format for this type of information that would be followed after his own time ." </P> <P> Theophrastus was barely known to western Europe in the Middle Ages; his writings were popularized there only in the 15th century, when Greek manuscripts in the Vatican, possibly, like many other ancient Vatican Greek manuscripts, brought from the Byzantine Empire during its fall to the Ottomans in the 15th century, were translated into Latin by the Byzantine Greek refugee Theodorus Gaza at the request of pope Nicholas V . The effect was to stimulate Renaissance scholars to restart the exploration of plant taxonomy . The science of botany was founded as these scholars engaged with the accounts of plants, and especially of their medicinal uses, together with a newly critical reaction to mediaeval pharmacology, which was based on unthinking acceptance of the Natural History of Pliny the Elder and the De Materia Medica of Dioscorides . By the same token, however, Theophrastus (and Aristotle) fell abruptly out of use around 1550, as classical botany and zoology were effectively assimilated into Renaissance thought in the form of illustrated encyclopedias--which were still heavily based on classical writings . Andrea Cesalpino made use of Theophrastus in his philosophical book on plants, De Plantis (1583). The Italian scholar Julius Caesar Scaliger's accurate and detailed commentaries on the Historia Plantarum were published in Leyden in 1584, after his death . </P> <P> The Chicago Botanic Garden describes Historia Plantarum as the "first great botanical work" of Theophrastus, "the first real botanist"; it states of the 1483 edition printed by Bartolomeo Confalonieri in Treviso that "all taxonomy of plants starts with this modest book", centuries before the modern taxonomy of Linnaeus . Anna Pavord observes in her 2005 book The Naming of Names that Theophrastus made the first ever classification of plants, and Pliny the Elder, now much better known, used much of his material . </P>

Who classified plants into herbs shrubs and trees