Botany

Remember at school when you had to draw a diagram of a plant? The roots and stems, sepals and petals, and trying to learn how to spell such long words as "photosynthesis". What about growing bean sprouts in a cupboard? Oh, those were the days. Well, you might not have realized it at the time, but you were learning the basic principles of botany.

What is Botany?

You see, botany is the study of plants. Basically the living world is divided into two groups, animals and plants, and if it isn’t an animal it has to be a plant – get it? Botany is an extremely important science; plants can tell us all sorts of things about the changing environment in loads of different ways.

• How plants respond to ultraviolet radiation can help us to monitor what’s going on in the ozone layer
• Recording and analyzing life cycles of plants can help us to keep an eye on climate change – to put it simply, some cooler countries may only get one crop per year whereas warmer places can get two, and the timing of the cycle is directly dependent upon the climate
• Pollen analysis from plants millions of years ago can help scientists to know about climates in the past, and from the past we ought to be able to learn for the future – very important climate change information
• Lichens are plants too, (scientists are not only concerned with pretty flowers) and are extremely sensitive to changes in atmospheric conditions, they can give an accurate indication of pollution, if you know what you’re looking for

Botany = Plants = Life

Even if you’re not a vegetarian, you’ll be surprised at how much of your diet depends on plants. Plants are the producer, right at the bottom of the food chain and the majority of our food depends on plants, you know how it goes – the cows eat the grass and we eat the cows. It actually goes much deeper than that though; our entire eco system is dependent on plants:

Flower Caterpillar Frog Snake Owl

There are literally thousands of food chains you can play with, it’s quite good fun really! They all follow a very similar pattern

Plants (producers) Herbivore (primary consumer) Carnivore (secondary consumer) and on it goes, fortunately, humans are generally at the top of the food chain, although there are some carnivores who think differently.

Botany in Medicine

Throughout history, botanists discovered that plants are not only a valuable food source, but also hold the key to many illnesses and diseases. Many drugs are directly derived from plants (both medicinal and recreational)

• Caffeine
• Nicotine
• Aspirin (originally derived from the bark of the willow tree)
• Morphine (from the opium poppy)

Many botanists think that this is just the tip of the iceberg (not the lettuce variety, the type that sunk the Titanic) with many more cures are just waiting to be discovered in the plant world.

Plants really do have a very important place in our world, not only for food but also cotton, rubber, fossil fuels, in fact, you name it, and we probably need to thank plants for it in the beginning.