Horticultural crops

(agriculture) Any food-producing plant.

Intensively managed plants cultivated for food or for esthetic purposes. Plant agriculture is divided traditionally into the fields of agronomy (herbaceous field crops, mainly grains, forages, oilseeds, and fiber crops), forestry (forest trees and products), and horticulture (garden crops, particularly fruits, vegetables, spices and herbs, and all plants grown for ornamental use). Most horticultural plants are utilized in the living state, with water essential to quality; thus most horticultural plants and products are highly perishable. See also Agronomy; Floriculture; Forest and forestry.

Horticultural crops are usually classified as edibles or ornamentals. Edible crops which are used for direct human consumption are commonly subdivided into fruits or vegetables, but this classification is traditional and difficult to define precisely.

Fruit crops in the horticultural sense are cultivated for tissues associated with the botanical fruit, that is, seed-bearing structures derived from the flower, which are usually pulpy and tasteful. Trees or shrubs bearing nuts, characterized by a hard shell separated by a firm inner kernel (the seed), are often treated as a special category of fruit crops. See also Fruit.

Vegetable crops in the horticulture sense are commonly herbaceous plants grown as annuals or biennials and occasionally as perennials that have edible parts (including, confusingly, the botanical fruit). Examples of edible parts include the root (sweet potato), tuber (potato), young shoot (asparagus), leaf (spinach), flower buds (cauliflower), fruit (tomato), and seed (pea).

Plants grown for ornamental use, such as cut flowers, bedding plants, interior foliage plants, or landscape plants, represent an enormous group and include thousands of species.