Tom Greve - Botanists

ITS ALIVE!

The Sun sets over a lonely desert. Near the bottom of a rocky ridge, a scientist sits near a small group of wildflowers. As pretty as the flowers are, the scientist is not there simply to admire their yellow petals. She is a botanist at work in the field, trying to understand some of the longest-running mysteries of life on planet Earth.

FIELD NOTES

A botanist is a scientist who studies plants. Like doctors who specialize in a wide range of medical studies, botanists can be experts in many different matters of plant life.

It is easy to know that people are alive. They can move, speak, and do all sorts of things that show they are living, breathing, and thinking. The same is true for animals. But what about plants?

Sometimes the easiest way to know a plant is living is to notice its growth. Some plants grow slowly. Others can grow quickly enough to see changes almost every day.

Bamboo trees are among the fastest-growing plants on Earth. In the right conditions, some bamboo trees can grow as much as 35 inches (.89 meters) in a single day!

The Saguaro cactus grows very slowly. In its first 10 years of life, a single cactus will grow to be less than two inches (five centimeters) high. But they can live to be 200 years old, and eventually reach 40 to 60 feet (12-18 meters) in height.

, and they can adapt to conditions around them.

BREAKTHROUGH BOTANIST

Carl Linnaeus

1707-1778

Though humans have harvested, eaten, and even used plants as medicine throughout history, the science of botany has blossomed in recent centuries. In the 1700s, Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus helped make sense of the of Earths plants and animals by classifying all living things based on physical characteristics. As a botanist, he classified plants based partly on how they reproduced. Linnaeuss ideas and research became central to botanical understanding long after he died. His work remains important to this day.

Scientists use the Greek words Plantae and Animalia to classify things as plants or animals. The Kingdom of Plantae includes all known species of plants, just as the Kingdom of Animalia includes all known species of animalsincluding human beings.

FIELD NOTES

KINGDOM PLANTAE
Mosses	Liverworts
Ferns	Club Moss
Cone-Bearing Plants	Flowering Plants

of plants. Their work plays an important role in understanding the complex relationships among Earths plants, as well as the relationship between plants, animals, and people.

Breakthroughs in plant understanding, whether from the tiny Wolffia plant, or the giant Sequoia tree, happen because of previous scientific research. We know things about the nature of plants that previous generations could not have imagined. This is true thanks in large part to the efforts of botanists.

Watermeal plants, also called duckweed, are the smallest flowering plants on Earth. Each tiny speck is an individual plant.