botany

1. 1. The science or study of plants.
   2. A book or scholarly work on this subject.
2. The plant life of a particular area: the botany of the Ohio River valley.
3. The characteristic features and biology of a particular kind of plant or plant group.

[Back-formation from earlier botanic, botanical, from Late Latin botanicus. See botanical.]

That branch of biological science which embraces the study of plants and plant life. Botanical studies may range from microscopic observations of the smallest and obscurest plants to the study of the trees of the forest. One botanist may be interested mainly in the relationships among plants and in their geographic distribution, whereas another may be primarily concerned with structure or with the study of the life processes taking place in plants.

Botany may be divided by subject matter into several specialties, such as plant anatomy, plant chemistry, plant cytology, plant ecology (including autecology and synecology), plant embryology, plant genetics, plant morphology, plant physiology, plant taxonomy, ethnobotany, and paleobotany. It may also be divided according to the group of plants being studied; for example, agostology, the study of grasses; algology (phycology), the study of algae; bryology, the study of mosses; mycology, the study of fungi; and pteridology, the study of ferns. Bacteriology and virology are also parts of botany in a broad sense. Furthermore, a number of agricultural subjects have botany as their foundation. Among these are agronomy, floriculture, forestry, horticulture, landscape architecture, and plant breeding. See also Agriculture; Agronomy; Bacteriology; Cell biology; Ecology; Floriculture; Genetics; Landscape architecture; Paleobotany; Plant anatomy; Plant growth; Plant morphogenesis; Plant pathology; Plant physiology; Plant taxonomy.

Definition: plant study
Antonyms: zoology

For more information on botany, visit Britannica.com.

The history of botany in America has several themes: the identification and study of new species discovered in the New World; the transformation of the field away from classification based on morphology, or shape, and toward interest in physiology and, later, genetics; the concomitant specialization and professionalization of botany, a subject that was originally relatively open to amateur practitioners, including women; and the development of American botanical research to rival the initially dominant European centers in England, France, and Germany. The European Renaissance had seen a revival of interest in botany and in ancient botanical works that was aided by the invention of the printing press in 1453, which allowed for a uniformity of plant depictions that hand-drawn manuscripts could not ensure.

Discoveries in the New World

The exploration of the New World, beginning with Columbus's voyage of 1492, was marked by the discovery of new flora and fauna, enthusiastically documented and described by travelers. It was not uncommon for those who wrote about the Americas to describe the plants and animals they had seen in terms of familiar European species, and, indeed, sometimes to mistakenly identify American species as being the same as European species. However, since plants do not move—unlike animals that might offer colonial settlers and travelers only a glimpse before disappearing—many American plants were quickly identified to be distinct from similar species in the Old World. Although Native Americans had developed their own classifications of North American flora, and although Native Americans were often a source of knowledge for colonists learning about the uses of new plants, Europeans tended to impose their own classifications onto the plants of the New World.

At the time, the discovery of new species posed a theological problem for European Christians, as the description of Noah's Ark insisted that Noah had gathered every kind of plant, while the New World contained many plants not part of the European and Asian ecosystems. Questions quickly arose as to whether there had once been a land bridge between the Americas and Eurasia and, even prior to Darwin, whether American plant species were modified variations on European species.

Moreover, some plants from the Americas became quite profitable crops for Europeans, most notably tobacco and chocolate, and many Europeans came over to explore and study the new plants. The first notable publication on the flora of the Americas was by Nicolás Monardes, who never traveled to the New World but wrote on its plants in his 1574 Historia Medicinal, which was translated into English by John Frampton as Joyfull Newes out of the Newe Founde Worlde (1577). The work was primarily concerned with the medicinal benefits of the plants and herbs in the Americas, and, indeed, many of the practitioners of botany in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and even into the nineteenth centuries were also trained in medicine and were interested in the possible new cures available in undocumented American plants.

However, amateurs also made important contributions to the study of American botanicals, examining the plants in local areas, presenting their findings at botanical societies, swapping samples with other botanists and sending plants back to Europe, and cultivating herbaria and arboreta. From colonial times until the mid-nineteenth century, the work of amateurs in finding, studying, and documenting new species was important to the study of botany as a whole. A primary example is Jane Colden (1724–1766), the daughter of the botanist Cadwallader Colden. Tutored only by her father, Jane Colden studied and drew the plants of New York, classifying hundreds of plants, including the gardenia, which she discovered.

Jane Colden was especially renowned for understanding and using the Linnaean classification scheme. Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), a Swedish doctor and botanist, developed his hierarchy throughout his life, his most notable publications including the Systema Naturae (1735), GeneraPlantarum (1737), and Species Plantarum (1753). The Linnaean system, which has since been greatly revised, divided animals and plants into kingdoms, classes, orders, genera, and species, all written in Latin. Each species was given a two-part (binomial) name of genus and species.

Classification

Linnaeus's classification system greatly influenced eighteenth-century botany in America. Some of his students came over to categorize the species of the New World, most significantly Pehr Kalm, who traveled through the Great Lakes, the Mid-Atlantic colonies, and Canada, bringing back samples. Meanwhile, colonial settlers like John Bartram (1699–1777), Cadwallader Colden (1688–1776), Humphry Marshall (1722–1801), and others worked to incorporate the local flora into the work of Linnaeus, which provided a new sense of order for those working on studying the plants and animals of the overwhelmingly diverse and novel New World.

But although the Linnaean system was helpful, it could not survive the strain of the thousands of new discoveries in the Americas and Asia. Plant classifications based on reproduction resulted in categories that contained obviously widely diverging plants. In particular, Linnaeus was challenged by French botanists who emphasized grouping plants by shape (morphology). Antoine Laurent de Jussieu's (1748–1836) 1789 Genera Plantarum prompted the reorganizing of classification by appearance and added levels to the taxonomy.

The Jussieu modifications quickly, but not uncontroversially, became added to botanical literature, although the Linnaean system continued to be used in many prominent American publications through the early nineteenth century. Meanwhile, French botanists made other contributions to the study of North American plants. André Michaux (1746–1802) and his son, François André (1770–1855), traveled through much of eastern North America, from Canada to the Bahamas, observing and collecting. The end result of their massive researches was the 1803 Flora Boreali-Americana, the first large-scale compilation of North American plants. The work of the Michaux drew, not uncritically, on the reforms of Jussieu.

Nineteenth-Century American Botanists

The Michaux volumes encouraged revisions, the first coming in 1814 with the Flora Americae Septentrionalis of Frederick Pursh (1774–1820), which incorporated findings from the Lewis and Clark Expedition and thus contained information about western America. Pursh's contemporary, Thomas Nuttall (1786–1859), was born and died in England, but his interest, education, and work in botany were conducted primarily in America, where he explored the south and west, collecting and publishing his findings. Although he is known for his extensive discoveries, Nuttall also wrote the 1818 Genera of the North American Plants and 1827 Introduction to Systematic and Physiological Botany. His work is symbolic of a turn from European-dominated study of North American plants toward American specialists in native species. Although Americans had always played important roles in the discovery, cataloging, and study of local plants, the early and mid-nineteenth century saw the burgeoning of work by American botanists, both amateur and professional. Meanwhile, the American government sponsored expeditions to find and collect plant species in the less studied areas of the south and west of America.

Among the American botanists of the early nineteenth century, the most famous are Jacob Bigelow (1786–1879), Amos Eaton (1776–1842), John Torrey (1796–1873), and Thomas Nuttall (1786–1859). Bigelow, who was trained as a doctor, was primarily interested in the medicinal uses of plants, but he also surveyed the flora of Boston for his Florula Bostoniensis (1814). Additionally, he did work in physiology, which was already a topic of considerable interest in the first decades of the century and would come to dominate morphology in botanical concerns by the end of the nineteenth century.

Amos Eaton gained his reputation primarily through his Manual of Botany (first published in 1817, but revised and enlarged through many editions), which became the basic botanical teaching text of the first half of the nineteenth century. Eaton, who also worked in geology and chemistry, encouraged the participation of women in science, although indeed women were already quite well represented in botany, which he noted. In part this botanical activity by women was due to the fact that contemporary botany required little laboratory equipment: discoveries could be made by anyone who was diligent and well read in botany, and so graduate degrees or access to laboratories—both largely denied at the time to women—were unnecessary to botanical work. However, although Eaton emphasized field work, the most accessible kind of botanical study, he was also part of a trend toward including laboratory experiments.

Eaton's teaching and text were very influential, perhaps most importantly in botany upon John Torrey, whom Eaton met while serving a prison sentence for forgery—a charge he denied. Torrey was the son of a man who worked for the State Prison of New York, and Eaton gave the young Torrey lessons in a variety of scientific subjects, including botany. While Torrey went on to have a career that included work in medicine, geology, mineralogy, and chemistry, he is primarily remembered for his botanical work, cataloging New York flora, collaborating with Asa Gray, creating a renowned herbarium, promoting government-financed expeditions, utilizing—albeit inconsistently—the classification work of John Lindley, and serving as the first president of the Torrey Botanical Society, a group of prominent amateur and professional botanists in New York. The Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Society, which began publication in 1870, is the oldest American botanical journal.

Although Bigelow, Eaton, Torrey, Nuttall, and others did much to encourage and expand knowledge of native plants, it is Asa Gray (1810–1888) who takes center stage in the history of American botany in the nineteenth century. Gray published A Flora of North America (1838–1843) with Torrey, which drew on the Lindley classification system, which was a development from Jussieu's "natural system." Gray's textbooks replaced those of Eaton, and the botanical research center he set up at Harvard cultivated many of the next generation of botanists and encouraged work in anatomy, cellular structure, and physiology, realms that were dominated by German botanists. Interested in East Asian flora as well as that of North America, Gray quickly supported Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory as expounded in the 1859 Origin of Species because he had noticed regional variation himself. This drew him into conflict with another Harvard professor, the zoologist Louis Agassiz, who was a prominent anti-Darwinian. However, evolution soon became a guiding principle in botanical study.

Theoretical Research

The twentieth century saw the rise of American research devoted to the theoretical aspects of botany, areas in which America had typically lagged behind Europe, as American botanists became more involved in experiments, physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, biochemistry, and genetics, and less involved in the discovery of new species. While Darwin could not provide an explanation for the origins of variation and the inheritance of characteristics, Gregor Mendel (1822–1884), a Moravian monk, offered hereditary principles based on experiments with pea plants in his Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden (Experiments in plant hybridization; 1865, 1869). Although Mendel's research went unacknowledged until 1900, when rediscovered it was profoundly influential in turning the research edge of botany, which was already moving from morphology to physiology, toward genetics as well. In addition, during the first half of the twentieth century, ecological research, which tied together the plants and animals of a habitat, began to thrive, as evidenced by the work of Henry Chandler Cowles (1869–1939) and others. Mathematics was put to use in the study of plant and animal populations, and in 1942 Raymond Lindeman (1915–1942) demonstrated the "trophic-dynamic aspect" of ecology to show how energy moves from individual to individual through a local environment.

Since the 1960s, plant physiology has looked more to understanding the relationship between plants and their surrounding environment: studying plant reactions to environmental change, both with a look to the evolutionary mechanisms involved and concerning the ongoing degradation of the global environment.

Moreover, the introduction of genetic research has prompted yet another change in taxonomy, with the rise of phylogenetics, in which variation is traced to the genetic level, allowing botanists to reorganize classification by evolutionary relatedness, replacing previous categories. Relatedly, work on population genetics, genetic engineering, and genomics (the study of all of the genes in a DNA sequence) has blossomed since the 1960s, a no-table recent achievement being the completion of the Arabadopsis thaliana genome—the first plant genome completely sequenced—in 2000. Although some of the work was completed by American researchers and partly funded by the American government, the project represents the prominent international collaborations that are shaping botany today, with aid also provided by the European Union and the Japanese government and research carried out in America, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Japan.

Bibliography

Evans, Howard Ensign. Pioneer Naturalists: The Discovery and Naming of North American Plants and Animals. New York: Henry Holt, 1993.

Greene, Edward Lee. Landmarks of Botanical History. Edited by Frank N. Egerton. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983.

Humphrey, Harry Baker. Makers of North American Botany. New York: Ronald Press, 1961.

Keeney, Elizabeth B. The Botanizers: Amateur Scientists in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

Mauseth, James D. Botany: An Introduction to Plant Biology. 2d ed. Boston: Jones and Bartlett, 1998.

Morton, A. G. History of Botanical Science: An Account of the Development of Botany from Ancient Times to the Present Day. New York: Academic Press, 1981.

Reveal, James L. Gentle Conquest: The Botanical Discovery of North America with Illustrations from the Library of Congress. Washington, D.C.: Starwood, 1992.

Stuckey, Ronald L., ed. Development of Botany in Selected Regions of North America before 1900. New York: Arno Press, 1978.

—Caroline R. Sherman

From antiquity into the late eighteenth century, the medical utility of plants provided the primary motive for studying them. However, from the late fifteenth century on, other reasons for the investigation of plants became increasingly important and gave botany a disciplinary and professional identity distinct from medicine. These included: explicating classical texts; portraying plants accurately in works of art; collecting rarities for natural history cabinets, gardens, and museums; exploiting natural resources; glorifying the wonders of creation; and satisfying the curiosity of natural philosophers. The primary thrust of botany in early modern Europe was plant identification, description, and classification, an effort that culminated in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when systematics assimilated morphology, reproduction, anatomy, and geography.

Late Fifteenth Century to Mid-Sixteenth Century

While editing the ancient authorities on medicinal plants—Pliny's Natural History and Dioscorides' De Materia medica (On the materials of medicine)—in the late fifteenth century, Italian humanists looked at living plants to resolve textual problems. In contrast to medieval doctors' dependence on illiterate herb-gatherers, medical humanists in the early sixteenth century strove to emulate Dioscorides' and Galen's firsthand experience with medicinal plants.

The lack of a shared vocabulary for plant description and nomenclature was circumvented by the addition of accurate, detailed, naturalistic woodcut illustrations to printed herbals—a key innovation introduced by Otto Brunfels's (1488–1534) Herbarum Vivae Eicones (Living images of plants, 1530) and Leonhard Fuchs's (1501–1534) Historia Stirpium (Notable commentaries on the history of plants, 1542), and imitated by virtually every herbal thereafter. The failure of Leonardo da Vinci's (1452–1519) superb drawings and observations of plant forms—unfinished at his death in 1519—to influence early modern botany underscores the scientific consequences of coupling the technology of printing to skill in depicting plants.

Beginning in the 1530s, medical schools at Padua, Pisa, Basel, and Montpellier established chairs of botany, required lectures, demonstrations, and field trips, and built botanical gardens. Students of Luca Ghini (1500–1556), professor of botany at Bologna and Pisa, spread his technique of preserving pressed, dried specimens throughout Europe.

Mid-Sixteenth Century to Early Seventeenth Century

The humanist physicians' desire to prescribe the precise plants named by classical authorities spurred Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1501–1578), a Habsburg court physician, to prepare a voluminous illustrated commentary on Dioscorides (first edition, 1544), the best-selling herbal of the period. Its revisions and enlargements helped Renaissance botanists realize that they knew far more plants than their ancient counterparts.

The immense "universal" herbals of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century—published or projected by major botanists from most European countries, including William Turner (c. 1508–1568), Conrad Gessner (1516–1565), Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605), Jacques Dalechamps (D'Aléchamps, Dalechampius, 1513–1588), Charles de L'Escluse (Clusius, 1526–1609), Matthias de L'Obel (Lobelius, 1538–1616), Rembert Dodoens (Dodonaeus, 1517–1585), Jean Bauhin (1541–1612), Caspar Bauhin (1560–1624), and John Gerard (1564–1637)—represented efforts to describe both long-familiar plants and the flood of new species. Plants entered European gardens and herbaria through the voyages of discovery and conquest and by exploration of local habitats. Informal networks of professional and amateur enthusiasts surmounted religious and political divisions and fostered a rapid international exchange of specimens, books, pictures, and observations.

To organize their entries, most herbals used a pragmatic mixture of systems, grouping some plants by their uses, others by similarities of form or habitats. Some herbals, emblem books, and books on natural magic—reflecting astrology, Paracelsan chemistry, and the search for symbolic significance in nature—stressed plants' hidden, inner properties, manifested by distinctive external "signatures." Appealing to Aristotle and Theophrastus's philosophical emphasis on growth and reproduction as the essential characteristics of the vegetative soul, Andrea Cesalpino (Caesalpinus, 1524–1603) stressed resemblances of seeds and fruits in grouping plants in his influential De Plantis Libri XVI (On plants, 1583).

Early Seventeenth Century to Late Eighteenth Century

Caspar Bauhin (1560–1624), professor of botany and anatomy at Basel, took the first critical step toward a single botanical lexicon of plant names: his Pinax Theatri Botanici (Pinax, i.e., Index, for the botanical realm, 1623) summarized the synonyms and literature for some six thousand plants—ten times the number in Dioscorides—and assigned them brief descriptive Latin names that emphasized their affinities. (Pinax remains an indispensable guide to identifying plants in earlier works.) An equally important step came from Joachim Jung's (1587–1657) astute analysis of plant parts, which reached John Ray (1627–1705)—English cleric, naturalist, natural philosopher, and fellow of the Royal Society—by 1660 in manuscript. Between 1660 and 1704, Ray linked taxonomy, nomenclature, morphology, and bibliography in a series of strictly botanical books that brought together first-hand accounts of many previously undescribed plants, new technical terminology (such as petal, calyx, cotyledon), close observations of growth and form, and deep reflection on method.

Ray spelled out the combinations of essential morphological features that defined natural classes of plants. While acknowledging natural groupings at least at the genus/species level (categories that went back to Aristotle), the French botanist, J. P. de Tournefort (1656–1708), countered with a convenient and widely adopted artificial system of classification based primarily on the disposition of flower parts.

The chemical composition of plants and the form and function of plant parts, previously regarded as unimportant, came under the scrutiny of botanists trained in iatrochemistry—notably Guy de la Brosse (1586–1641), the founder of the Paris Jardin des Plantes in 1640—and in microscopy. Robert Hooke (1635–1703) and Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712) in England and Marcello Malphighi (1628–1694) in Italy reported to the Royal Society in the late seventeenth century on their experimental investigations of plant cells and tissue structures. Stephen Hales (1677–1761) in the 1720s and Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) and Jan Ingen-Housz (1730–1799) half a century later devised chemical and physical experiments to measure plant nutrition and metabolism.

The demonstration of sexual reproduction in flowering plants—in an obscure 1694 publication, De Sexu Plantarum Epistola (On the sex of plants), by Rudolf Jacob Camerer (Camerarius), professor of medicine at Tübingen—both resolved a longstanding question and provided the brilliant Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) with the basis of a taxonomic system that overrode all earlier proposals.

Believing that God had created species and genera, Linnaeus embedded their essential characters in his binomial nomenclature—henceforth giving the terms "genus" and "species" distinctive scientific meanings. Although Linnaeus clearly recognized larger natural groupings (plant families were methodically elucidated by the French botanists Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu [1748–1836] and Michel Adanson [1727–1806] in the late eighteenth century), his Species Plantarum (Species of plants, 1753) constructed a deliberately artificial system of classification, easily understood by anyone—even "ladies"—who could count the sexual parts of flowers. By imposing a common language and rational organization on the plant kingdom, Linnaeus made botany both a symbol of divine order and the epitome of Enlightenment science.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Bauhinus, Casparus. Pinax Theatri Botanici. Basel, 1623.

Brunfelsius, Otho. Herbarum Vivae Eicones. Strasbourg, 1530.

Camerarius, Rudolphus Jacobus. De Sexu Plantarum Epistola. Tübingen, 1694.

Caesalpinus, Andreas. De Plantis Libri XVI. Florence, 1583.

Linnaeus, Carl. Species Plantarum. London, 1957–1959. A facsimile of the first edition, 1753.

Meyer, Frederick G., Emily Emmart Trueblood, and John L. Heller. The Great Herbal of Leonhart Fuchs: Vol. 1, Commentary; Vol. 2, De Historia Stirpium Commentarii Insignes, 1542: Facsimile. Stanford, 1999.

Secondary Sources

Arber, Agnes. Herbals, Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470–1670. 3rd ed. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1986. Facsimile reprint of second edition (1938), with an introduction and annotations by William T. Stearn.

Findlen, Paula. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley, 1994.

Koerner, Lisbet. Linnaeus: Nature and Nation. Cambridge, Mass., 1999.

Morton, A. G. History of Botanical Science: An Account of the Development of Botany from Ancient Times to the Present Day. London and New York, 1981.

Reeds, Karen Meier. Botany in Medieval and Renaissance Universities. New York, 1991.

—KAREN REEDS

The scientific study and categorization of plants. (See fruit, photosynthesis, and plant kingdom.)

n.

The science of vegetables -- those that are not good to eat, as well as those that are. It deals largely with their flowers, which are commonly badly designed, inartistic in color, and ill- smelling.

The science or study of plants.

Pinguicula grandiflora commonly known as a Butterwort

Example of a cross section of a stem ^[1]

For other uses, see Botany (disambiguation).

Botany, plant science(s), phytology, or plant biology is a branch of biology and is the scientific study of plant life and development. Botany covers a wide range of scientific disciplines that study plants, algae, and fungi including: structure, growth, reproduction, metabolism, development, diseases, chemical properties, and evolutionary relationships between the different groups. Botany began with tribal efforts to identify edible, medicinal and poisonous plants, making botany one of the oldest sciences. From this ancient interest in plants, the scope of botany has increased to include the study of over 550,000 species of living organisms.

Contents 1 Scope and importance of botany 1.1 Human nutrition 1.2 Fundamental life processes 1.3 Medicine and materials 1.4 Environmental changes 2 Etymology 3 History 3.1 Early botany 3.2 Medieval botany 3.3 Early modern botany 3.4 Modern botany 4 Subdisciplines of botany 5 Notable botanists 6 See also 7 References 7.1 Notes 7.2 Bibliography 7.2.1 Popular science 7.2.2 Academic and scientific 8 External links 8.1 Flora and other plant catalogs or databases

Scope and importance of botany

Hibiscus

As with other life forms in biology, plant life can be studied from different perspectives, from the molecular, genetic and biochemical level through organelles, cells, tissues, organs, individuals, plant populations, and communities of plants. At each of these levels a botanist might be concerned with the classification (taxonomy), structure (anatomy and morphology), or function (physiology) of plant life.

Historically all living things were grouped as animals or plants,^[2] and botany covered all organisms not considered animals. Some organisms once included in the field of botany are no longer considered to belong to the plant kingdom – these include fungi (studied in mycology), lichens (lichenology), bacteria (bacteriology), viruses (virology) and single-celled algae, which are now grouped as part of the Protista. However, attention is still given to these groups by botanists, and fungi, lichens, bacteria and photosynthetic protists are usually covered in introductory botany courses.

The study of plants is vital because they are a fundamental part of life on Earth, which generates the oxygen, food, fibres, fuel and medicine that allow humans and other life forms to exist. Through photosynthesis, plants absorb carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that in large amounts can affect global climate. Additionally, they prevent soil erosion and are influential in the water cycle. A good understanding of plants is crucial to the future of human societies as it allows us to:

• Produce food to feed an expanding population
• Understand fundamental life processes
• Produce medicine and materials to treat diseases and other ailments
• Understand environmental changes more clearly

Paleobotanists study ancient plants in the fossil record. It is believed that early in the Earth's history, the evolution of photosynthetic plants altered the global atmosphere of the earth, changing the ancient atmosphere by oxidation.

Human nutrition

Nearly all the food we eat comes (directly and indirectly) from plants like this American long grain rice

Virtually all foods eaten come from plants, either directly from staple foods and other fruit and vegetables, or indirectly through livestock or other animals, which rely on plants for their nutrition. Plants are the fundamental base of nearly all food chains because they use the energy from the sun and nutrients from the soil and atmosphere, converting them into a form that can be consumed and utilized by animals; this is what ecologists call the first trophic level. Botanists also study how plants produce food we can eat and how to increase yields and therefore their work is important in mankind's ability to feed the world and provide food security for future generations, for example, through plant breeding. Botanists also study weeds, plants which are considered to be a nuisance in a particular location. Weeds are a considerable problem in agriculture, and botany provides some of the basic science used to understand how to minimize 'weed' impact in agriculture and native ecosystems. Ethnobotany is the study of the relationships between plants and people.

Fundamental life processes

Plants are convenient organisms in which fundamental life processes (like cell division and protein synthesis) can be studied, without the ethical dilemmas of studying animals or humans. The genetic laws of inheritance were discovered in this way by Gregor Mendel, who was studying the way pea shape is inherited. What Mendel learned from studying plants has had far reaching benefits outside of botany. Additionally, Barbara McClintock discovered 'jumping genes' by studying maize. These are a few examples that demonstrate how botanical research has an ongoing relevance to the understanding of fundamental biological processes.

Medicine and materials

Many medicinal and recreational drugs, like tetrahydrocannabinol, caffeine, and nicotine come directly from the plant kingdom. Others are simple derivatives of botanical natural products; for example, aspirin is based on the pain killer salicylic acid which originally came from the bark of willow trees. As well, the narcotic analgesics such as morphine are derived from the opium poppy.^[3] There may be many novel cures for diseases provided by plants, waiting to be discovered. Popular stimulants like coffee, chocolate, tobacco, and tea also come from plants. Most alcoholic beverages come from fermenting plants such as barley (beer), rice (sake) and grapes (wine).

Plants also provide us with many natural materials, such as hemp, cotton, wood, paper, linen, vegetable oils, some types of rope, and rubber. The production of silk would not be possible without the cultivation of the mulberry plant. Sugarcane, rapeseed, soy and other plants with a highly-fermentable sugar or oil content have recently been put to use as sources of biofuels, which are important alternatives to fossil fuels (see biodiesel).

Environmental changes

Plants can also help us understand changes in on our environment in many ways.

• Understanding habitat destruction and species extinction is dependent on an accurate and complete catalog of plant systematics and taxonomy.
• Plant responses to ultraviolet radiation can help us monitor problems like ozone depletion.
• Analyzing pollen deposited by plants thousands or millions of years ago can help scientists to reconstruct past climates and predict future ones, an essential part of climate change research.
• Recording and analyzing the timing of plant life cycles are important parts of phenology used in climate-change research.
• Lichens, which are sensitive to atmospheric conditions, have been extensively used as pollution indicators.

In many different ways, plants can act a little like the 'miners' canary', an early warning system alerting us to important changes in our environment. In addition to these practical and scientific reasons, plants are extremely valuable as recreation for millions of people who enjoy gardening, horticultural and culinary uses of plants every day.

Etymology

From Greek βοτάνη = "pasture, grass, fodder", perhaps via the idea of a livestock keeper needing to know which plants are safe for livestock to eat.

History

The traditional tools of a botanist

Early botany

Ancient India

Early examples of plant taxonomy occur in the Rigveda, that divides plants into Vṛska (tree), Osadhi (herbs useful to humans) and Virudha (creepers), which are then further subdivided. The Atharvaveda divides plants into eight classes, Visakha (spreading branches), Manjari (leaves with long clusters), Sthambini (bushy plants), Prastanavati (which expands); Ekasṛnga (those with monopodial growth), Pratanavati (creeping plants), Amsumati (with many stalks), and Kandini (plants with knotty joints). The Taittiriya Samhita classifies the plant kingdom into vṛksa, vana and druma (trees), visakha (shrubs with spreading branches), sasa (herbs), amsumali (a spreading or deliquescent plant), vratati (climber), stambini (bushy plant), pratanavati (creeper), and alasala (those spreading on the ground).

Manusmriti – Law book of Hindus – proposed a classification of plants in eight major categories. Charaka Samhitā and Sushruta Samhita and the Vaisesikas also present an elaborate taxonomy.

Parashara, the author of Vṛksayurveda (the science of life of trees), classifies plants into Dvimatrka (Dicotyledons) and Ekamatrka (Monocotyledons). These are further classified into Samiganiya (Fabaceae), Puplikagalniya (Rutaceae), Svastikaganiya (Cruciferae), Tripuspaganiya (Cucurbitaceae), Mallikaganiya (Apocynaceae), and Kurcapuspaganiya (Asteraceae).^[4]

Important medieval Indian works of plant physiology include the Prthviniraparyam of Udayana, Nyayavindutika of Dharmottara, Saddarsana-samuccaya of Gunaratna, and Upaskara of Sankaramisra.^[4]

Ancient China

In ancient China, the recorded listing of different plants and herb concoctions for pharmaceutical purposes spans back to at least the Warring States (481 BC-221 BC). Many Chinese writers over the centuries contributed to the written knowledge of herbal pharmaceutics. There was the Han Dynasty (202 BC-220 AD) written work of the Huangdi Neijing and the famous pharmacologist Zhang Zhongjing of the 2nd century. There was also the 11th century scientists and statesmen Su Song and Shen Kuo, who compiled treatises on herbal medicine and included the use of mineralogy.

Greco-Roman world

Among the earliest of botanical works in Europe, written around 300 B.C., are two large treatises by Theophrastus: On the History of Plants (Historia Plantarum) and On the Causes of Plants. Together these books constitute the most important contribution to botanical science during antiquity and on into the Middle Ages. Aristotle also wrote about plants.^[5]

The Roman medical writer Pedanius Dioscorides (ca.40-90) provides important evidence on Greek and Roman knowledge of medicinal plants. Dioscorides is famous for writing a five volume book in his native Greek Περί ύλης ιατρικής (De Materia Medica - in the Latin translation) that is one of the most influential herbal books in history. In fact, it remained in use until about CE 1600.^[6] Approximately 1300-1400 different plant species were known under Roman reign.^[7]

Medieval botany

Main article: Muslim Agricultural Revolution

The Persian biologist Abū Ḥanīfa Dīnawarī (828-896) is considered the founder of Arabic botany for his Book of Plants, in which he described at least 637 plants and discussed plant development from germination to death, describing the phases of plant growth and the production of flowers and fruit.^[8]

Theophrastus’s Historia Plantarum served as a reference point in botany for many centuries, and was further developed around 1200 by Giovanni Bodeo da Stapelio, who added a commentarius and drawings: see Historia Plantarum —Selected pages of a 17th century edition of the 1200 version (in Italian).

In the early 13th century, the Andalusian-Arabian biologist Abu al-Abbas al-Nabati developed an early scientific method for botany, introducing empirical and experimental techniques in the testing, description and identification of numerous materia medica, and separating unverified reports from those supported by actual tests and observations.^[9] His student Ibn al-Baitar (d. 1248) wrote a pharmaceutical encyclopedia describing 1,400 plants, foods, and drugs, 300 of which were his own original discoveries. A Latin translation of his work was useful to European biologists and pharmacists in the 18th and 19th centuries.^[10]

Early modern botany

Crantz's Classis cruciformium..., 1769

German physician Leonhart Fuchs (1501–1566) was one of the three founding fathers of botany, along with Otto Brunfels (1489- 1534) and Hieronymus Bock (1498-1554) (also called Hieronymus Tragus).^[11]

Valerius Cordus (1515–1554) authored one of the greatest pharmacopoeias and one of the most celebrated herbals in history, Dispensatorium (1546).^[12] As early as the 16th century, the Italian Ulisse Aldrovandi was scientifically researching plants. In 1665, using an early microscope, Robert Hooke discovered cells in cork, and a short time later in living plant tissue. The Germans Jacob Theodor Klein and Leonhart Fuchs, the Swiss Conrad von Gesner, and the British authors Nicholas Culpeper and Christopher Cole published herbals that gave information on the medicinal uses of plants.

During the 18th century systems of classification became deliberately artificial and served only for the purpose of identification. These classifications are comparable to diagnostic keys, where taxa are artificially grouped in pairs by few, easily recognisable characters. The sequence of the taxa in keys is often totally unrelated to their natural or phyletic groupings. In the 18th century an increasing number of new plants had arrived in Europe, from newly discovered countries and the European colonies worldwide, and a larger amount of plants became available for study.

In 1754 Carl von Linné (Carl Linnaeus) divided the plant Kingdom into 25 classes. One, the Cryptogamia, included all the plants with concealed reproductive parts (algae, fungi, mosses and liverworts and ferns).^[13]

The increased knowledge on anatomy, morphology and life cycles, lead to the realization that there were more natural affinities between plants, than the sexual system of Linnaeus indicated. Adanson (1763), Jussieu (1789), and Candolle (1819) all proposed various alternative natural systems that were widely followed. The ideas of natural selection as a mechanism for evolution required adaptations to the Candollean system, which started the studies on evolutionary relationships and phylogenetic classifications of plants.

Modern botany

A considerable amount of new knowledge today is being generated from studying model plants like Arabidopsis thaliana. This weedy species in the mustard family was one of the first plants to have its genome sequenced. The sequencing of the rice (Oryza sativa) genome, its relatively small genome, and a large international research community have made rice an important cereal/grass/monocot model.^[14] Another grass species, Brachypodium distachyon is also emerging as an experimental model for understanding the genetic, cellular and molecular biology of temperate grasses. Other commercially-important staple foods like wheat, maize, barley, rye, pearl millet and soybean are also having their genomes sequenced. Some of these are challenging to sequence because they have more than two haploid (n) sets of chromosomes, a condition known as polyploidy, common in the plant kingdom. Chlamydomonas reinhardtii (a single-celled, green alga) is another plant model organism that has been extensively studied and provided important insights into cell biology.

In 1998 the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group published a phylogeny of flowering plants based on an analysis of DNA sequences from most families of flowering plants. As a result of this work, major questions such as which families represent the earliest branches in the genealogy of angiosperms are now understood. Investigating how plant species are related to each other allows botanists to better understand the process of evolution in plants.

Subdisciplines of botany

Agronomy — Application of plant science to crop production Bryology — Mosses, liverworts, and hornworts Economic botany — Study of plants of economic use or value Ethnobotany — Relationship between humans and plants Forestry — Forest management and related studies Horticulture — Cultivated plants Lichenology — The study of lichens Paleobotany — Fossil plants Palynology — Pollen and spores

Phycology — Algae Phytochemistry — Plant secondary chemistry and chemical processes Phytopathology — Plant diseases Plant anatomy — Cell and tissue structure Plant ecology — Role of plants in the environment Plant genetics — Genetic inheritance in plants Plant morphology — Structure and life cycles Plant physiology — Life functions of plants Plant systematics — Classification and naming of plants

Notable botanists

Further information: List of botanists

• Ibn al-Baitar (d. 1248), Andalusian-Arab scientist, botanist, pharmacist, physician, and author of one of the largest botanical encyclopedias.
• Aimé Bonpland (1773-1858), French explorer and botanist, who accompanied Alexander von Humboldt during five years of travel in Latin America.
• Luther Burbank (1849-1926), American botanist, horticulturist, and a pioneer in agricultural science.
• Augustin Pyramus de Candolle He originated the idea of "Nature's war", which influenced Charles Darwin.
• Abū Ḥanīfa Dīnawarī (828-896), Persian botanist, historian, geographer, astronomer, mathematician, and founder of Arabic botany.
• David Douglas (1799-1834), Scottish botanical explorer of North America and China, who imported many ornamental plants into Europe.
• Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911), English botanist and explorer. Second winner of Darwin Medal.
• Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), English biologist, known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Third winner of Darwin Medal.
• Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), Swedish botanist, physician and zoologist who laid the foundations for the modern scheme of Binomial nomenclature. He is known as the father of modern taxonomy, and is also considered one of the fathers of modern ecology.
• Gregor Johann Mendel (1822-1884), Augustinian priest and scientist, and is often called the father of genetics for his study of the inheritance of traits in pea plants.
• Carlos Muñoz Pizarro, Chilean botanist, known for his studies of the Chilean flora, and its conservation.
• Abu al-Abbas al-Nabati (c. 1200), Andalusian-Arab botanist and agricultural scientist, and a pioneer in experimental botany.
• Richard Spruce (1817-1893), English botanist and explorer who carried out a detailed study of the Amazon flora.
• Agustín Stahl (1842-1917), conducted investigations and experiments in the fields of ethnology, and zoology in the Caribbean region.
• George Ledyard Stebbins, Jr. Widely regarded as one of the leading evolutionary biologists of the 20th century, developed a comprehensive synthesis of plant evolution incorporating genetics.
• Theophrastus (c. 371 – c. 287 BC) - Father of Botany, established botanical science through his lecture notes, Enquiry into Plants.
• Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Italian polymath; a scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and writer.

See also

Main article: Outline of botany

• Botanical garden and List of botanical gardens
• Dendrochronology
• Edible Flowers
• Flowers and List of flowers
• Forestry
• Herbs
• History of plant systematics
• History of phycology
• List of botanical journals
• List of botanists
• List of botanists by author abbreviation
• List of publications in biology
• List of domesticated plants
• List of systems of plant taxonomy
• Paleobotany
• Palynology
• Plant anatomy
• Plant community
• Plant physiology
• Plant sexuality
• Seeds
• Soil science
• Trees
• Vegetation
• Weed Science
• Zoology

|}

References

Notes

1. ^ Winterborne J, 2005. Hydroponics - Indoor Horticulture
2. ^ Chapman, Jasmin, et al.. Science Web. Nelson Thornes. pp. 56. ISBN 0-17-438746-6. 
3. ^ Mann, J. (1987). Secondary Metabolism, 2nd ed.. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 186–187. ISBN 0-19-855529-6. 
4. ^ ^{a b} Ancient Indian Botany and Taxonomy
5. ^ Botany - History of botany
6. ^ Timeline: Pedanius Dioscorides, c. 40–90 CE
7. ^ Botany online: The History of a Science
8. ^ Fahd, Toufic. "Botany and agriculture". pp. 815. , in Morelon, Régis & Roshdi Rashed (1996), Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science, vol. 3, Routledge, ISBN 0415124107
9. ^ Huff, Toby (2003). The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West. Cambridge University Press. p. 218. ISBN 0521529948. 
10. ^ Boulanger, Diane (2002) "The Islamic Contribution to Science, Mathematics and Technology", OISE Papers, in STSE Education, Vol. 3.
11. ^ Early herbals – The German fathers of botany
12. ^ Valerius Cordus | Science and Its Times: 1450-1699 Summary
13. ^ Hoek, C. van den, Mann, D.G. and Jahns, H.M. 2005. Algae: An Introduction to Phycology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 0 521 30419 9
14. ^ Devos, Katrien M. (2000). "Genome Relationships: The Grass Model in Current Research" (free full text). The Plant Cell 12: 637. doi:10.2307/3870991. http://www.plantcell.org/cgi/content/full/12/5/637. 

Bibliography

Popular science

• Attenborough, David The Private Life of Plants, ISBN 0-563-37023-8
• Bellamy, David Bellamy on Botany, ISBN 0-563-10666-2 An accessible and short introduction to various botanical subjects
• Capon, B: Botany for Gardeners ISBN 0-88192-655-8
• Cohen, J. How many people can the earth support? London: W. W. Norton 1995 ISBN 0-393-31495-2
• Halle, Francis. In Praise of Plants. ISBN 0-88192-550-0. English translation of a poetic advocacy of plants.
• King, J. Reaching for the sun: How plants work ISBN 0-521-58738-7 A fluent introduction to how plants work
• Pakenham, Thomas (2002) Remarkable Trees of the World ISBN 0-297-84300-1
• Pakenham, Thomas (1996) Meetings with Remarkable Trees ISBN 0-297-83255-7
• Pollan, M. The Botany of Desire: a plant's-eye view of the world. London: Bloomsbury ISBN 0-7475-6300-4 Account of the co-evolution of plants and humans
• Thomas, B. A. (1981) The evolution of plants and flowers New York: St Martin's Press ISBN 0-312-27271-5
• Walker, D. Energy, Plants and Man ISBN 1-870232-05-4 A presentation of the basic concepts of photosynthesis

Academic and scientific

• Crawford, R. M. M. (1989). Studies in Plant Survival. Oxford: Blackwell ISBN 0-632-01475-X
• Matthews, R. E. F. Fundamentals of plant virology Academic Press,1992.
• Mauseth, J. D.: Botany : an introduction to plant biology. Jones and Bartlett Publishers, ISBN 0-7637-2134-4, A first year undergraduate level textbook
• Morton, A. G. (1981). History of Botanical Science.Academic Press, London. ISBN 0-12-508380-7 (hardback) ISBN 0-12-508382-3 (paperback)
• Raven, Peter H., Evert, Ray H. and Eichhorn, Susan E. (2005) Biology of Plants; 7th ed. New York: W. H. Freeman ISBN 1-57259-041-6 (A first year undergraduate level textbook; 1st ed. by Peter H. Raven; Helena Curtis. [New York]: Worth, 1970; 6th ed. 1999)
• Ridge, I. (2002) Plants Oxford University Press ISBN 0-19-925548-2
• Strange, R. L. (2003) Introduction to plant pathology. Weinheim: Wiley-VCH ISBN 0-470-84973-8
• Walter, H. (1985) Vegetation of the earth; 3rd rev. ed. Springer.
• Willis, K. (2002) The Evolution of Plants. Oxford University Press ISBN 0-19-850065-3 £22-99

Environmental botany

• Crawley, M. J. (1997). Plant ecology. Blackwell Scientific ISBN 0-632-03639-7
• Ennos, Roland and Sheffield, Elizabeth Plant Life. Oxford: Blackwell Science ISBN 0-86542-737-2 Introduction to plant biodiversity
• Everitt, J. H.; Lonard, R. L., Little, C. R. (2007). Weeds in South Texas and Northern Mexico. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press.  ISBN 0-89672-614-2
• Richards, P. W. (1996). The Tropical Rainforest. 2nd ed. Cambridge U. P. (Pbk) ISBN 0-521-42194-2 £32.50
• Stace, C. A. (1997) A New Flora of the British Isles. 2nd ed. Cambridge U. P. ISBN 0-521-58935-5

Plant physiology

• Bowsher, C. G., Steer, M. W. & Tobin, A. K. (2008) Plant Biochemistry. New York & Abingdon: Garland Science, Taylor & Francis Group ISBN 0-8153-4121-0
• Buchanan, B. B., Gruissem, W. & Jones, R. L. (2000) Biochemistry & Molecular Biology of Plants. American Society of Plant Physiologists ISBN 0-943088-39-9
• Fitter, A. & Hay, R. Environmental Physiology of Plants; 3rd edition. New York: Harcourt Publishers, Academic Press ISBN 0-12-257766-3
• Lambers, Hans, Chapin, F. Stuart, III and Pons, Thijs L. (1998) Plant Physiological Ecology. New York: Springer-Verlag ISBN 0-387-98326-0
  • http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-78341-3 2nd completely revised edition. New York: Springer, 2008
• Lawlor, D. W. (2000) Photosynthesis BIOS ISBN 1-85996-157-6
• Salisbury, F. B. and Ross, C. W. (1992) Plant Physiology; 4th ed. Belmont, Calif: Wadsworth ISBN 0-534-15162-0
• Taiz, Lincoln & Zeiger, Eduardo (1991) Plant Physiology. Redwood City, Calif.: Benjamin/Cummings
  • 3rd ed. Sunderland, Mass: Sinauer Associates, 2002 ISBN 0-87893-823-0
  • 4th ed. Sunderland, Mass: Sinauer Associates, 2006 ISBN 9780878938568

External links

At Wikiversity you can learn more and teach others about Botany at: The Department of Botany

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of Botany

Biology portal

• U.S. Geological Survey. National Biological Information Infrastructure: Botany
• Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation
• plant growth and the plant cell from Kimball's Biology Pages
• Botanical Society of America: What is Botany?
• Science and Plants for Schools
• Teaching Documents about Botany Teaching documents, lecture notes and tutorials online: an annotated link directory.
• American society of plant biologists APSB
• Why study Plants? Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge
• Botany Photo of the Day
• Anales del Jardín Botánico de Madrid, Journal published by Real Jardín Botánico, CSIC (scientific articles in Spanish, English, and other languages)
• Collectanea Botanica, Journal published by Institut Botànic de Barcelona, CSIC (scientific articles in Spanish, English, and other languages)

Flora and other plant catalogs or databases

• Plant
• The Virtual Library of Botany
• High quality pictures of plants and information about them from Catholic University of Leuven
• Curtis's Botanical Magazine, 1790-1856
• The Trees Of Great Britain and Ireland, by Henry John Elwes & Augustine Henry, 1906-1913
• Botanik-Datenbank (ger.)
• Plant Directory (ger.)
• USDA plant database
• The Linnean Society of London
• Native Plant Information Network
• Directory of Plants (PDF)

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - botanik

n. - kamgarn, merinould

Nederlands (Dutch)
botanie, plantkunde

Français (French)
n. - botanique

n. - laine mérinos (d'Australie)

Deutsch (German)
n. - Botanik, Pflanzenkunde

n. - Merino Wolle (vor allem Australien)

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - βοτανική, φυτολογία

Italiano (Italian)
botanica

Português (Portuguese)
n. - botânica (f)

Русский (Russian)
ботаника

Español (Spanish)
n. - botánica

n. - lana merina de Australia

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - botanik

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
植物学

植物学

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 植物學

n. - 植物學

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 식물학, 전체 식물

n. - 오스트레일리아 산의 최고급 메리노 양모

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 植物学, 一地域の植物, 一地域の植物の生態

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) علم النبات‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮תורת הצומח, בוטניקה‬
n. - ‮צמר של כבשי מרינו, בייחוד מאוסטרליה‬

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