User:Sarr Cat/Botany

This is a short essay about botany I wrote for school.

=What Is Botany?= By Sarr Cat

Botany, you may have heard the term before, probably in the context of gardening, floristry, or even farming. If you know anything about it, you are probably aware that it has something to do with plants. But what exactly is botany? Is it just growing and appreciating plants in your garden? Is it the careful observation of plants in their native habitat? Or is it the rigorous scientific study of plant life in a laboratory? And just what exactly does it mean to be a botanist?

Simply speaking, botany is the branch of biology that concerns itself wit the study of plant life. This means that the field of botany covers a wide variety of professions and includes many sub-fields. The history of botany began in ancient times, with herbalism, also known as herbology, which was humans’ first attempt at studying the properties of the plants they found growing in their environment. Herbalism often included traditional medicinal and spiritual practices in which plants were a key ingredient. As time passed, and we gained more knowledge about our world, we developed the methods used in science. This was an important development and led to the development of many new fields of study. Botany was no exception, it evolved directly from the pre-scientific herbalism into the biological science it is today.

Now you may be wondering, “If botany is a rigorous field of study that involves the application of the scientific method, then what exactly is it that I am doing in my garden? I don’t use the scientific method to set out rows of tomato plants, cabbages and broccoli, so I must not be practicing botany.” If that is what you are wondering, the you would be correct. The kind of recreational gardening you do in your backyard is actually NOT a part of botany. Neither is farming, or floristry. These are all examples of another discipline, known as horticulture. While botany is the scientific study of plant life, horticulture is the art and practice of raising plants. Horticulture includes both gardening on a smaller backyard scale, as well as the industrial-scale cultivated fields that form the backbone of our food system. You can think of horticulture as “applied botany”, the knowledge of plant life gained from the science of botany is applied in the practice of horticulture. The two are very closely tied to one another, and many botanists are also horticulturalists and vice versa.

So if botany is the scientific study of plants while horticulture is the cultivation of plants does that mean that botanists are the ones cooped up in a laboratory while horticulturalists get to have all the fun out in the sunlight and fresh air? Not at all! While some botanists may spend most of their time in the lab, others are out in the wilderness, examining species in their natural habitat, or out taking data from a plot of cultivated land. Botany has many sub-fields, including, but not limited to:


 * Plant physiology, the study of how plants function as a living system
 * Pant ecology, the study of how plants interact in an ecosystem
 * Plant biochemistry, the study of the biological chemicals produced by plants
 * Ethnobotany, the study of how humans and plants interact
 * Botanical pharmacognosy, the study of drugs derived from plants

Many of these disciplines require days in the lab, mixing, testing, recording, and analyzing, performing experiments with whole plants or living or dead plant matter under tightly controlled conditions. But if it weren’t for field botanists, botanists, there would be far less to do in the lab. Field botany is botany taken out of the lab, into the natural world. A field botanists work mostly consists of collecting data samples from test plots, monitoring wild plant populations, cataloguing and collecting specimens and bringing these back into the lab again for analysis. Because their work takes them out into plant’s natural habitat, field botanists are often the first to discover new species of plants. Many plant species are actually named after the botanists who discovered them.

As I hope I have made clear in this essay, botany is a very complicated topic, but is far from boring. It ranges from scientists slaving over detailed studies in the lab to exploration and categorization of plant species in the wild. Botany affects us all, because when botanical knowledge is applied to improve the genetics of crop plants, it produces increased yields of food, an excellent example of using science to solve real world problems, like world hunger. And for the amateur horticulturist, it provides useful knowledge to keeping the lawn and garden thriving. If I have done as good a job as I think I have with this quick essay, you will be able to see why botany, and it’s sister, horticulture are two of my favorite subjects!