Botany is the complex science of plants, considering their origin, development, external and internal structure, classification, distribution on the earth’s surface, and conservation and ecology.

What does the word botany mean? The word “botany” itself comes from the Greek word “βοτάνη,” which means green, herb, plant, vegetable.

Botany is a branch of the science of the vegetation of the Earth’s surface at all levels: cellular, molecular, organismal, and population. Accordingly, a botanist is one who studies all of these directly.

Botany as the science of plants has a rich prehistory. It originated in ancient times: at the beginning of people’s use of plants to meet their practical needs. These needs included food, medicine, shelter, and clothing.

For a long period of time naturalists only described plants: their size, the specificity of individual organs, characteristic coloring, etc. This is the so-called descriptive nature of botany.

What is botany, which sections of botany exist, who is a botanist and other questions were actively posed to researchers in the 17-18 centuries, the time of active formation of botany as a branch of biology.

The systematization of the plant world is closely connected with the beginning of the use of the comparative-descriptive method. With its help, plants were described and compared with others on the basis of external (morphological) features.

The experimental direction emerged and became dominant with the invention of the microscope, and later with the development of science and microscopic technique.

Modern botany is not just a science that studies plants, or even a science that studies the classification of plants.

Botany studies everything about plants and includes various sections. One of the most important sections is systematics.

Botany is divided into floristics and botanical geography. The former is concerned with the study of plant communities in a particular area, and the latter with the study of plant distribution patterns on the planet.

Plant species
Plants are an important source of biologically active substances (in plants their number can reach ten). These substances directly affect the human and animal body because they are consumed in food.

Being an essential element of human life, plants have become closely studied. Plants include two large groups:

Inferior or stratified (thalomaceous) plants. These include algae.
The higher, or leafy, plants. These include mosses (mosses and liverworts), gymnosperms, angiosperms, and ferns (horsetails, ferns, psilotes, and psilophytes).
Fungi, lichens, and bacteria are studied separately.