Botany began as a hunt for plants that heal, feed or kill
The science of plants grew out of prehistoric herbalism, the urgent business of telling edible from poisonous from medicinal. Its name comes from a Greek word for pasture or fodder. A student of Aristotle, Theophrastus, laid its foundations, and his books stayed unrivalled for about seventeen centuries.
Botany, or plant science, studies how plants grow, reproduce and evolve, from their chemistry and genes to their ecology and classification. Its scope is vast: roughly 410,000 species of land plants, including around 369,000 flowering plants and some 20,000 bryophytes. By tradition it also embraced fungi and algae, which still fall within the remit of the International Botanical Congress.
Early plant writing appears in Indian texts older than 1100 BCE, in Egyptian and Avestan sources, and in Chinese works said to predate 221 BCE. Theophrastus, living around 371 to 287 BCE and often called the father of botany, wrote Enquiry into Plants and On the Causes of Plants. In the first century, the physician Dioscorides compiled De materia medica, a five-volume herbal read for more than 1,500 years. Scholars of the medieval Muslim world, such as Dinawari with his Book of Plants and Ibn al-Baitar in the 13th century, pushed the subject towards systematic study.
Gardens turned it into an academic discipline. Monastery physic gardens grew possible remedies, and from the 1540s Italian universities founded botanical gardens; Padua's, from 1545, is usually counted the oldest still on its original site. England waited until Oxford's garden in 1621. In Germany, Leonhart Fuchs, Otto Brunfels and Hieronymus Bock broke with copying ancient authorities and began observing plants for themselves. Cataloguing collections eventually led to Carl Linnaeus's two-part naming system of 1753, still used for every species.
Tools kept transforming the field. In 1665 Robert Hooke peered at cork through an early microscope and named the cells he saw. Later centuries added electron microscopy, chromosome counts and protein chemistry, and from the late 20th century DNA sequencing let botanists reclassify plants more accurately. Today the research feeds staple crops, timber, rubber, fibres and medicines, as well as breeding, forestry and the protection of biodiversity.
Source: Botany
