Category: Methods In Botany

Experimental research under controlled conditions, made possible by botanical gardens and their ranges of greenhouses and controlled environmental chambers, has become an integral part of the methodology of modern plant taxonomy. A second major tool of the taxonomist is the herbarium, a reference collection consisting of carefully selected and dried plants attached to paper sheets of a standard size and filed in a systematic way so…

When plant ecology first emerged as a subscience of botany, it was largely descriptive. Today, however, it has become a common meeting ground for all the plant sciences, as well as for other sciences. In addition, it has become much more quantitative. As a result, the tools and methods of plant ecologists are those available for measuring…

Plant physiology and plant biochemistry are the most technical areas of botany; most major advances in physiology also reflect the development of either a new technique or the dramatic refinement of an earlier one to give a new degree of precision. Fortunately, the methodology of measurement has been vastly improved in recent decades, largely through the development of various…

The invention of the compound microscope provided a valuable and durable instrument for the investigation of the inner structure of plants. Early plant morphologists, especially those studying cell structure, were handicapped as much by the lack of adequate knowledge of how to prepare specimens as they were by the imperfect microscopes of the time. A revolution in the effectiveness of microscopy…