A Bout of Botany

It's very difficult to learn Herbal Medicine with out learning some Botany along the way. So here's a little "bout" of Botany.

For starters some Scientific terms and their dictionary.com definitions:
Taxonomy → the branch of science concerned with classification, especially of organisms; systematics.
Physiology → the branch of biology that deals with the normal functions of living organisms and their parts.
Anatomy → the branch of science concerned with the bodily structure of humans, animals, and other living organisms, especially as revealed by dissection and the separation of parts.

So what all of that means is that Taxonomy is the classification or "Place" that an organism fits in. This is where we have out Kingdom, Phylum, Order, Family Class, Genus, and Species. We are usually a lot more familiar with the latter two because genus and species are what are commonly used in the scientific (or latin) names for organisms. (ex. Homo sapien, is the scientific name for human.)

Plants have the same type of classification, starting with the Kingdom Viridiplantae, instead of the Kingdom Animalia (Also called Metazoa). Meaning they are both living organisms, however they are not the same type of living organism.

Physiology deals with actual functions of living organisms and their parts, meaning how their actual parts work. A good example would be the human heart and how it pumps blood throughout the body. Physiology goes hand in hand with Anatomy because it's the study of the actual parts themselves instead of what they do. So it would be a concentration on just the structure of the heart instead of what the heart does. Anatomy would care more about the atria and ventricles (The chambers of the heart) than it would about the physical motion of the blood pumping.

These apply equally to plants and are often used to help determine the plants parts and how the overall plant functions.

Plant Anatomy & Physiology:
There are several different types of plants, some that grow flowers, some that bear fruit, some that bear neither. We could go into all of the taxonomy of each individual plant such as the Bryophytes (The mosses and hornworts) and the Magnoliaphyta (The Magnolias), but that would take awhile and I'm sure unless you're going into Botany like I am not quite as interesting.

So the big ones you would need to know are the Gymnosperms and the Angiosperms. Gymnosperms produce no flowers and bear no fruit, where it gets it's name Gymno meaning "naked" and sperm meaning "seed". The seeds are not wrapped in any form of fruit.

The Angiosperm translates to "vessel seed" because the seeds are wrapped in a fruit or "vessel" usually an ovary.

Just like humans, plants have male and female parts, for Angiosperms the male parts referred to as the Stamen which is broken up into two parts the Anther (Where the pollen comes from) and the Filament (Which helps support the Anther.  The female parts or the Pistil consist of four parts, the Stigma (Usually located in the middle of the flower), the Style (Which supports the Stigma), then the Ovary (Which is at the base of the Style), and the Ovule (Which is within the Ovary). The male parts cause the pollen we so very much "adore" because that is... well for lack of a better word... plant sperm attempting to travel and land on the Style of another plant and therefore contribute to plant reproduction forming seeds in the Ovaries and being turned into fruit (When you eat fruit you're eating the Pericarp which in some fruit bearing plants is the actual plants ovary.

With Gymnosperms the process is a little different. A good example of a Gymnosperm is the pine tree. Everyone is familiar with pine cones, the cones that often fall to the ground are actually the female cones that have released seeds. The male cones (which are much smaller) are responsible for the pollen that coats our cars every spring. The male cones release the pollen and it flies into the air in the form of tiny little grains that are shaped like Mickey Mouse heads. They fly to the next tree and pollinate the female cones. At this time the female cone that had been open for the time of pollination closes up until the seeds have been fertilized and are produced. Then it opens to release the seeds that have little "wings" and they spread by the power of wind. The female cone then falls from the tree and it is what we find all over the ground in the fall.

There are also two differentiators between plants calling them either Dicots (Trees, woody plants) and Monocots (Herbaceous or green plants). There are few differences that you can really only observe through a microscope, but the biggest and most noticeable are that a Dicot is a plant capable of what is called "Secondary growth". Primary growth, that most plants experience is vertical growth, what allows them to grow up and down. Secondary growth is the plants ability to grow outward or horizontal growth, often times Dicots grow bark or "wood" from special tissues that give trees and plants like Rosemary their woody appearance.

Plants actually grow down, not up. If you've ever grown or seen a plant grown from a seed you might have noticed the seed shell on the very tip of the plant when it emerges from the soil. This is because the Apical Meristem, the primary meristem of plant growth, is at the top of the plant, not the bottom. So the plant actually grows down into the dirt, and the seed and Apical Meristem are pushed out by the force. 

Constituents, what we talked about before  as being the parts of herbs that made them medicinal falls under Phytochemisty which is a newer type of chemistry that studies the chemical compounds in plants, such as those found to be constituents.

Now  that you know a little bit more about Botany you can understand more about herbs.

~Lindsey Shemwell (The Budding Botanist)