Botany, also called plant science or phytology, is the branch of natural science and biology studying plants, especially their anatomy, taxonomy, and ecology. A botanist, plant scientist or phytologist is a scientist who specialises in this field. Nowadays, botanists study approximately 410,000 species of land plants, including some 391,000 species of vascular plants and approximately 20,000 bryophytes.
Food is any substance consumed by an organism for nutritional support. Food is usually of plant, animal, or fungal origin and contains essential nutrients such as carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, or minerals. The substance is ingested by an organism and assimilated by the organism's cells to provide energy, maintain life, or stimulate growth. Different species of animals have different feeding behaviours that satisfy the needs of their metabolisms and have evolved to fill a specific ecological niche within specific geographical contexts.
Led Zeppelin were an English rock band formed in London in 1968. The band comprised Robert Plant (vocals), Jimmy Page (guitar), John Paul Jones, and John Bonham (drums). With a heavy, guitar-driven sound and drawing from influences including blues and folk music, Led Zeppelin are cited as a progenitor of hard rock and heavy metal. They significantly influenced the music industry, particularly in the development of album-oriented rock and stadium rock.
Flowering plants are plants that bear flowers and fruits, and form the clade Angiospermae. The term 'angiosperm' is derived from the Greek words ἀγγεῖον / angeion and σπέρμα / sperma ('seed'), meaning that the seeds are enclosed within a fruit. The group was formerly called Magnoliophyta.
Photosynthesis is a system of biological processes by which photosynthetic organisms, such as most plants, algae, and cyanobacteria, convert light energy, typically from sunlight, into the chemical energy necessary to fuel their metabolism. Photosynthesis usually refers to oxygenic photosynthesis, a process that produces oxygen. Photosynthetic organisms store the chemical energy so produced within intracellular organic compounds like sugars, glycogen, cellulose and starches. To use this stored chemical energy, an organism's cells metabolize the organic compounds through cellular respiration. Photosynthesis plays a critical role in producing and maintaining the oxygen content of the Earth's atmosphere, and it supplies most of the biological energy necessary for complex life on Earth.
Sex is the biological trait that determines whether a sexually reproducing organism produces male or female gametes. During sexual reproduction, a male and a female gamete fuse to form a zygote, which develops into an offspring that inherits traits from each parent. By convention, organisms that produce smaller, more mobile gametes are called male, while organisms that produce larger, non-mobile gametes are called female. An organism that produces both types of gamete is hermaphrodite.
In biology, taxonomy is the scientific study of naming, defining (circumscribing) and classifying groups of biological organisms based on shared characteristics. Organisms are grouped into taxa, and these groups are given a taxonomic rank; groups of a given rank can be aggregated to form a more inclusive group of higher rank, thus creating a taxonomic hierarchy. The principal ranks in modern use are domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus is regarded as the founder of the current system of taxonomy, as he developed a ranked system known as Linnaean taxonomy for categorizing organisms and binomial nomenclature for naming organisms.
Vascular plants, also called tracheophytes or collectively tracheophyta, are plants that have lignified tissues for conducting water and minerals throughout the plant. They also have a specialized non-lignified tissue to conduct products of photosynthesis. The group includes most land plants other than mosses.
Robert Anthony Plant is an English singer and songwriter. He was the lead singer and lyricist of the rock band Led Zeppelin from its founding in 1968 until their breakup in 1980. Since then, he has had a successful solo career, sometimes collaborating with other artists such as Alison Krauss. Regarded by many as one of the greatest singers in rock music, he is known for his flamboyant persona, raw stage performances and his powerful, wide-ranging voice.
A cultivar is a kind of cultivated plant that people have selected for desired traits and which retains those traits when propagated. Methods used to propagate cultivars include division, root and stem cuttings, offsets, grafting, tissue culture, or carefully controlled seed production. Most cultivars arise from deliberate human manipulation, but some originate from wild plants that have distinctive characteristics. Cultivar names are chosen according to rules of the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants (ICNCP), and not all cultivated plants qualify as cultivars. Horticulturists generally believe the word cultivar was coined as a term meaning "cultivated variety".
A power station, also referred to as a power plant and sometimes generating station or generating plant, is an industrial facility for the generation of electric power. Power stations are generally connected to an electrical grid.
Horticulture is the art and science of growing ornamental plants, fruits, vegetables, flowers, trees and shrubs. Horticulture is commonly associated with the more professional and technical aspects of plant cultivation on a smaller and more controlled scale than agronomy. There are various divisions of horticulture because plants are grown for a variety of purposes. These divisions include, but are not limited to: propagation, arboriculture, landscaping, floriculture and turf maintenance. For each of these, there are various professions, aspects, tools used and associated challenges; Each requiring highly specialized skills and knowledge of the horticulturist.
Bignoniaceae is a family of flowering plants in the order Lamiales commonly known as the bignonias or trumpet vines. It is not known to which of the other families in the order it is most closely related.
Legumes are plants in the family Fabaceae, or the fruit or seeds of such plants. When used as a dry grain for human consumption, the seeds are also called pulses. Legumes are grown agriculturally, primarily for human consumption, but also as livestock forage and silage, and as soil-enhancing green manure. Well-known legumes include beans, chickpeas, peanuts, lentils, lupins, mesquite, carob, tamarind, alfalfa, and clover. Legumes produce a botanically unique type of fruit – a simple dry fruit that develops from a simple carpel and usually dehisces on two sides.
In horticulture, the term is used to differentiate a plant from shorter-lived annuals and biennials. It has thus been defined as a plant that lives more than two years. The term is also loosely used to distinguish plants with little or no woody growth from trees and shrubs, which are also technically perennials. Notably, it is estimated that 94% of plant species fall under the category of perennials, underscoring the prevalence of plants with lifespans exceeding two years in the botanical world.
A flower, also known as a bloom or blossom, is the reproductive structure found in flowering plants. Flowers consist of a combination of vegetative organs – sepals that enclose and protect the developing flower. Petals attract pollinators, and reproductive organs that produce gametophytes, which in flowering plants produce gametes. The male gametophytes, which produce sperm, are enclosed within pollen grains produced in the anthers. The female gametophytes are contained within the ovules produced in the ovary. In some plants, multiple flowers occur singly on a pedicel, and some are arranged in a group (inflorescence) on a peduncle.
Iriartea is a genus in the palm family Arecaceae. It is native to Central and South America. The best-known species – and probably the only one – is Iriartea deltoidea, which is found from Nicaragua, south into Bolivia and a great portion of Western Amazonian basin. It is the most common tree in many forests in which it occurs.
Plants are the eukaryotes that form the kingdom Plantae; they are predominantly photosynthetic. This means that they obtain their energy from sunlight, using chloroplasts derived from endosymbiosis with cyanobacteria to produce sugars from carbon dioxide and water, using the green pigment chlorophyll. Exceptions are parasitic plants that have lost the genes for chlorophyll and photosynthesis, and obtain their energy from other plants or fungi. Most plants are multicellular, except for some green algae.
Maize, also known as corn in North American English, is a tall stout grass that produces cereal grain. It was domesticated by indigenous peoples in southern Mexico about 9,000 years ago from wild teosinte. Native Americans planted it alongside beans and squashes in the Three Sisters polyculture. The leafy stalk of the plant gives rise to male inflorescences or tassels which produce pollen, and female inflorescences called ears. The ears yield grain, known as kernels or seeds. In modern commercial varieties, these are usually yellow or white; other varieties can be of many colors.
Godmania aesculifolia is a species of flowering plant in the family Bignoniaceae, native to the New World tropics. A tree, it contains 7,8-dihydroxyflavone, a flavonoid.
