I was on the phone the other day talking with a University of Auckland psychology student, who was drumming up donations from alumni for refugee students.  She had my details at hand, and during the course of our pleasant conversation, she said “What’s Botany?”.

I was taken aback, and why not? I told her it meant plant sciences. I had done my undergraduate and PhD degrees at Auckland in the Botany Department, the general subject matter botany, although my PhD was specifically in plant physiology.  There are few if any botany departments around now, although Otago University still boldly has one, also named Te Tari Huaota, pretty much a direct translation.  Somehow, the terms zoology and geology have fared better.

Botany hangs on in the botanic garden, a term with a long lineage, blossoming in the 17^th C as physick gardens and in the 19^th century with more than a whiff of empire and colonialism. You’ll find botanic gardens in most of the major British Empire outposts. And there has been a more recent revival with botanicals infiltrating gin and vodka, and health products.  The term even has some geography, with Botany Downs, or just Botany, an eastern suburb of Auckland, named such by mere whim as far as I can find out. In Australia, there is still Botany Bay, with a better provenance, being Cook’s first landing and named after Joseph Bank’s plant collecting there.

The word botany is derived from the Greek term βοτάνη (botanē) for grasses or pasture, and denotes one of the two strands that arrive at modern plant science. One is the agricultural and horticultural use of plants for food and fodder and the other is plant-based medicine, with mediaeval herbals and physick gardens providing the basis for study of both the usefulness and function of plants as well as their taxonomy. Botany as a term does not feature much in early literature. The pioneer of experimental plant physiology, Stephen Hales (read more) uses the term ‘Vegetable’ as was common when he published his book ‘Vegetable Staticks’ in 1727. And vegetable as a general term still hung on into recent times. I can remember the British television game show Animal, Vegetable, Mineral in the 1950s.

In Botany Stage I and II, we not only studied botany, but coped, under the leadership of Prof. Val Chapman, a Cambridge man from that university’s Botany School, with cryptogamic botany (mosses, ferns, algae, fungi – reproducing from spores rather than flower-derived seeds), pteridophytes (vascular plants such as ferns, which also produce spores), gametophytes and sporophytes (the haploid and diploid stages of the plant life cycle), and lots of other terms that still resonate, even if a bit of googling is required to jog the memory. The word ‘botany’ has a lovely round, almost comforting sound. Let’s not lose it.