Concept

Botany

Overview

Botany, also called plant science, is the branch of natural science and biology that studies the growth, reproduction and evolution of plants over the last 3.5 billion years of life on earth. As with all areas of biology and medicine, plants can be studied at range of levels from their biochemistry, molecular biology, cell biology and genetics to their ecology, pathology, anatomy, morphology and taxonomy. A botanist or plant scientist is a scientist who specialises in this field. Plants can be defined in multiple ways including approximately 410,000 species of land plants, and some 391,000 species of vascular plants, of which approximately 369,000 are flowering plants and approximately 20,000 bryophytes.

Botany originated from prehistoric herbalism to identify and cultivate plants that were edible, poisonous, and medicinal, making it one of the first endeavours of human investigation. Medieval physic gardens, often attached to monasteries, contained plants that possibly had medicinal benefits. They were forerunners of the first botanical gardens attached to universities, founded from the 1540s onwards. One of the earliest was the Padua botanical garden. These gardens facilitated the academic study of plants. Efforts to catalogue and describe their collections were the beginnings of plant taxonomy and led in 1753 to the binomial system of nomenclature of Carl Linnaeus that remains in use to this day for the naming of all biological species.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, new techniques were developed for the study of plants, including methods of optical microscopy and live cell imaging, electron microscopy, analysis of chromosome number, plant chemistry and the structure and function of enzymes and other proteins. In the last two decades of the 20th century, botanists exploited the techniques of molecular genetic analysis, including genomics and proteomics and DNA sequences to classify plants more accurately.

Modern botany is a broad subject with contributions and insights from most other areas of science and technology. Research topics include the study of plant structure, growth and differentiation, reproduction, biochemistry and primary metabolism, chemical products, development, diseases, evolutionary relationships, systematics, and plant taxonomy. Dominant themes in 21st-century plant science are molecular genetics and epigenetics, which study the mechanisms and control of gene expression during differentiation of plant cells and tissues. Botanical research has diverse applications in providing staple foods, materials such as timber, oil, rubber, fibre and drugs, in modern horticulture, agriculture and forestry, plant propagation, breeding and genetic modification, in the synthesis of chemicals and raw materials for construction and energy production, in environmental management, and the maintenance of biodiversity.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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Elementary courses in physics, chemistry, and botany are given pupils, and the bearing of the work on what they are doing in the shops is made clear. The botany is taught in connection with the gardening classes, chemistry for the girls is given in the form of the elements of food chemistry. One school gives a laboratory class in electricity, where the pupils make the industrial application of the laws they are…
John Dewey, Schools of to-morrow
States what Botany is; names Botany twice.
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And one does then come back to pure mechanism, but only by giving a new meaning to the word "correlation"--a meaning which would now make correlation inapplicable to the detail it is called upon to explain.
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
States what Botany is; opens on Botany.
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“It is not necessary here to give any detailed account of the terms of botany. The fundamental ones have been gradually introduced, as the parts of plants were more carefully and minutely examined. Thus the flower was necessarily distinguished into the _calyx_, the _corolla_, the _stamens_, and the _pistils_; the sections of the corolla were termed _petals_ by Columna; those of the calyx were called _sepals_ by…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
States what Botany is; opens on Botany.
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Botany

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