Kathy Oedevalde, age 10, of Bartonville, Illinois, for her question:
What training do botanists have?
Botany has the answers to what is cork and where we get vanilla, why rushes grow by streams and what makes tomatoes red. It also explains why crops fail and why we do not run out of oxygen. Teams of botanists have solved about a zillion important problems in our everyday lives.
The field of botany has enough projects for almost everyone to select either a career or a hobby. Biology, of course, is the immense science of living things and botany is the branch of biology that copes with the plant kingdom. Its experts specialize as cultivators and classifiers, growers and gardeners, doctors and detectives to more than three quarters of a million different plants. Naturally, all living and non living things are directly or indirectly linked together. So specialized branches of botany dip into geology and geography, chemistry and physics and many other science fields.
The number of fascinating careers in botany is past counting. But all of them begin in school with basic courses in math and general science. True, many people turn to plant study late in life and often become top botanists. But the easy way is to tackle the groundwork early so that the proper methods of handling the problems become built in habits. Learning the structure of plant classification is a must. Learning the phyla and classes, the orders and families of the plant kingdom is easier to memorize in youth, before the brain becomes set in its way.
There are, of course, lots of fascinating projects and experiments that go with the basic groundwork. Such projects concentrate on special aspects of botany and a student may sample many corners of the immense field. Real specialization usually comes later, when the student knows for sure which corner of the field he or she prefers. Many botanists specialize in one of the various branches of agriculture. They become experts in suitable soils and climates, fertilizers and irrigation. Many specialize in the control of bugs and other plant pests, work that takes them into chemistry and animal biology.
A lot of important biologists work in laboratories probing the secrets of living plant cells. Some of these specialize in plant diseases, such as rusts and other parasites that destroy our crops and gardens, parks and forests. Other lab botanists probe for plant chemicals that can be used as drugs and medicines, dyes and resins, oils and substances for making such items as rubber and chewing gum. The plant world is so immense, so complicated and vital to us, that a real expert has only time to concentrate on a limited aspect of it. A botanist knows the whole field in a general way, but as a rule he or she becomes a special expert in one class or plant family or in one plant process, such as the miracle of chlorophyll.
Nothing is more important to us than the plant world. It provides our oxygen, feeds us and our animals. The first botanists were the first farmers who used their human brains to grow crops from seeds. They started our long history of coaxing the plant world to yield us more food. Without farmers, gardeners and nurserymen the human family would be very small and far from civilized. Without the help of these workaday botanists, nature could provide only enough food forgone person in every 1,000 people living in the modern world.