The study of plants, botany, (from the French word, botanique (botanical) and three Greek words botanikos (botanical), botane (plant or herb), and boskein (to feed) appears to have had its origins in the Stone Age. What started as a pure practicality -- the need to feed themselves, eventually developed into an intellectual interest. Curiousity about how plants reproduce and how they are put together led to plant study becoming a science. A science may be distinguished from other fields by several features. It involves the observation, recording, organization, and classification of facts, and more importantly, it involves what is done with the facts. Scientific procedure involves experimentation, observation and verification or discarding of information, chiefly through inductive reasoning from known samples.
Chinese, Assyrians, and Egyptians all were cultivating plants more than 4,000 years ago. Aristotle, though better known for his philosiphical works, founded the first botanical garden in Greece in the third century B.C. At his death, Aristotle willed his garden and it's associated library to his pupil, Theophrastus of Eresus. His contributions to botany and science were so great that he is called "The Father of Botany".
With the printing press in the middle of the fifteenth century came many printed botanical works called herbals. Herbalists were mostly concerned with medicinal plants and produced elaborate and intriguing illustrations and drawings accompanied by sometimes outrageous stories and descriptions. Some of these stories became legends and developed into the Doctrine of Signatures. According to this doctrine, if a plant resembled a body part, it was useful for the treatment of diseases of that organ. For example, walnuts were used to treat brain disorders because they resembled miniature brains, and hepatica leaves which have liver-shaped lobes were used to treat liver diseases. Otto Brunfels, one of the more famous herbalists, published a three-volume herbal in 1530 which had excellent illustrations and is considered to be a link between ancient and modern botany.
In Holland little more than four hundred years ago, Zacharias Janssen and his brother Francis, produced the first microscope. Anton van Leewenhoek impoved on the lens design, and botany entered another era. Before, plant study had been dominated by study of external plant features. In the mid 1600's , the Englishman Robert Hooke took a penknife, carved thin slices of cork, and made a remarkable discovery. He described honeycomb-like compartments he saw in the slices, and contributed the term "cell" to the vocabulary of science. Even today with the advent of electron microscopes, and laser confocal microscopes, the light microscope remains an essential tool for observing living cells and it all started with a plant cell.
Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus did more for the field of Plant Taxonomy, the oldest branch of plant study, when he developed the Binomial System of Nomenclature. Thousands of plant names in use today are those originally recorded in his book Species Plantarum, published in 1753. Biologists are sometimes thought by the general public to be a little more than strange when referring to corn as Zea mays. They are not, however, merely trying to act superior or trying to be difficult, but rather, identifying one species as distinct from another. The single two-part latin scientific name, is the only one correct name for an organism no matter where it may be found, but many common names may be given to the same organism, and the same common name may apply to different organisms as well. In Europe, with its many languages, the problem is magnified. Here's a good example. The weed, Plantago major, broadleaved plaintain in English, has at least 45 other English names, 11 French names, 75 Dutch names, 106 German names, and perhaps as many as several hundred more names in other languages. Dozens of these common names also apply to quite different plants. If it were not for the recognition of the need for worldwide uniformity in naming and classification of organisms, communications concerning plants would likely be chaotic.
During the nineteenth century, great strides were made in Botany. Plant geography and plant morphology developed. Charles Darwin said of Sir Joseph Hooker's Flora Antarctica, "It is by far the grandest and most interesting essay on subjects of nature I have ever read." The science of heredity, was founded by the "Father of Genetics", Gregor Mendel , through his classic experiments with peas, and how cells multiply and function in sexual reproduction had been discovered. In the twentieth century even more discoveries have been made.
Much remains to be discovered and investigated. It is probable that at least one-third of all the organisms traditionally regarded as plants (having cell walls and cholorphyll) are not yet named, let alone thoroughly studied. Saving wild plants from extinction as civilization encroaches on our wild spaces and invades native habitats is imperative, else the earth's population won't continue to be fed, housed, or clothed.
Most people don't know the difference between Horticulture and Botany. So, let me tell you. Very simply, Horticulture is How To Grow Plants, and Botany is How Plants Grow. That's not to say that many horticulturists don't know a hill of beans about Botany or that botanists don't know about Horticulutre. The two sciences go hand in hand. Students of Horticulture must study Botany to graduate, but many Botany students never see a plant! I know that sounds odd, but many Plant Cell Biologists and Molecular Biologists use the same techniques as scientists in search of a cure for AIDS or Cancer and study plant cells grown in laboratory petri dishes and flasks much like bacterial cultures, never touching an intact plant. When I was in graduate school studying Botany at The University of Texas at Austin, I knew one student who finished her PhD in Plant Molecular Biology using soybean cells in her research who couldn't even recognize a soybean plant growing in a farmer's field!
Modern Botany can be broken down into many different areas. Among these are Bryology (the study of mosses and liverworts), Mycology (the study of fungi), Phycology (the study of algae), Plant Ecology, Plant Evolution, Ethnobotany, Paleobotany, Phytochemistry, Plant Anatomy, Plant Physiology, Plant Geography, Plant Morphology, Plant Systematics and Taxonomy, Plant Genetics, and Plant Cell Biology and Plant Molecular Biology. I've probably left out some other areas too!
