We study three representations of hierarchies of partitions: dendrograms (direct representations), saliency maps, and minimum spanning trees. We provide a new bijection between saliency maps and hierarchies based on quasi-flat zones as used in image processing and characterize saliency maps and minimum spanning trees as solutions to constrained minimization problems where the constraint is quasi-flat zones preservation. In practice, these results form a toolkit for new hierarchical methods where one can choose the most convenient representation. They also invite us to process non-image data with morphological hierarchies.