Information You Need About Plants
To Help You Become a Better Gardener
Plants are essential to the balance of nature and to life itself. Green plants, i.e., those possessing chlorophyll, use photosynthesis to manufacture their own food. This process converts sunlight and carbon dioxide into food, giving off oxygen as a byproduct.
Plants are the ultimate source of food and metabolic energy for nearly all animals, which cannot manufacture their own food.
Besides foods (e.g., grains, fruits, and vegetables), plant products vital to humans include wood and wood products, fibers, drugs, oils, latex, pigments, and resins. Coal is a fossil substance of plant origin. Thus plants provide people not only sustenance but shelter, clothing, medicines, fuels, and the raw materials from which many other products are made.
Plant Categories
Trees A tree can be defined as a large, perennial, woody plant. Though there is no set definition regarding minimum size, the term generally applies to plants at least 6 m (20 ft) high at maturity and, more importantly, having secondary branches supported on a single main stem or trunk (see Shrub for comparison).
Compared with most other plant forms, trees are long-lived. A few species of trees grow to 100 m tall, and some can live for several millennia.
What are your state tree and flower?
A fruit tree is a tree that bears fruit. Fruit are the structures formed by the ripened ovary of a flower, containing one or more seeds.
However, because all trees of flowering plants produce fruit (essentially all trees except tree ferns and gymnosperms), the term in horticultural usage applies to trees providing fruit as human food.
Fruit trees in this sense also includes nut-bearing trees, such as walnuts and pecans.
A shrub or bush is a horticultural rather than strictly botanical category of woody plant, distinguished from a tree by its multiple stems and lower height, usually less than 6 m (20 feet) tall.
In gardening, a hedge is a row of woody plants, generally of one species, used to demarcate spaces.
If a mixture of small trees and shrubs is used instead, to keep people and animals from straying through pasture or cropland, the result is a hedgerow.
Some hedgerows separating fields from lanes in England and the Low Countries are estimated to be over seven hundred years old.
Roses come in three varieties—the climber for an arbor or fence, the shrub rose for a flower garden, and the landscape rose for ground cover.
A groundcover is any plant used for the purpose of growing over an area of ground to hide it or to protect it from erosion or drought.
Strictly speaking, the most widespread groundcovers are grasses of various types. In common parlance, however, the term groundcover refers to non-grass plants that are used in place of grasses.
The word vine was originally a term for the plant on which grapes grew, from the word for wine (Greek "oinos"). In American usage, "vine" is now a generic term for all climbing plants. In British English, "the vine" is specifically the grape vine; other vines are termed "climbers."
Ferns
A fern is any of a group of some 20,000 species of plants classified as Pteridophyta.
A fern is a vascular plant that does not produce seeds, but reproduces by spores. New sporophyte fronds typically arise by "leaves" unrolling.
Ornamental grasses have become increasingly popular over the last several years. They vary in sizes from a few inches to several feet.
Grasses come in brown, blue, red, green, cream, and variegations. What gives grasses their long season is that the new growth is lush and beautiful, the summer appearance can be spectacular, and the flowers are often dramatic and long lasting.
Almost all ornamental grasses are perennials, that is they come up in spring, from their roots, which have stored large quantities of energy from the previous season. They grow again during the summer, storing energy for the next season, and go dormant in fall and winter.
A small percentage are evergreen, and even fewer are annuals. Most are "cultivars," a particular line of a grass species, and must be propagated by dividing an existing plant.
Bulbs
A bulb is an underground vertical shoot that has modified leaves (or thickened leaf bases) that are used as food storage organs by a dormant plant.
Other types of storage organs (such as corms, rhizomes, and tubers) are sometimes erroneously referred to as bulbs. The correct term for plants that form underground storage organs, including bulbs as well as tubers and corms, is geophyte.
Herbs
An herb (pronounced "urb" in American English and "hurb" in British English) is a plant grown for culinary or medicinal value. The green, leafy part of the plant is typically used.
General usage differs between culinary herbs and medicinal herbs. A medicinal herb may be a shrub or other woody plant, whereas a culinary herb is a non-woody plant.
By contrast, spices are the seeds, berries, bark, root, or other parts of the plant, even leaves in some cases. Culinary herbs are distinguished from vegetables in that they are used in small quantities and provide flavor to food rather than substance.
Indoor Plants
A houseplant is typically grown indoors in places such as a house or office. Houseplants are usually decorative, although herbs can be grown indoors.
A perennial plant or perennial (Latin per, "through," annuum, "year") is a plant that produces flowers and seeds more than one time in its lifespan, and therefore lives for more than one year.
This term is usually applied to herbaceous plants or small shrubs rather than large shrubs or trees, but used strictly it also applies to all plants that flower and produce seeds more than once.
An annual plant or annual (Latin annuum, or year) has a lifespan of a year or less. These are generally plants adapted to life as weeds or in difficult habitats where quick flowering and seeding are necessary.
A seed is the ripened ovule of gymnosperm or angiosperm plants. The importance of the seed relative to more primitive forms of reproduction and dispersal is attested to by the success of these two groups of plants in dominating the landscape.
Weed is the generic word for a plant growing in a spot where it is not wanted. Weeds become of economic significance in connection with farming, where they may damage crops or poison domesticated animals.
Many weeds are short-lived annual plants that normally take advantage of temporarily bare soil to produce another generation of seeds before the soil is covered over again by slower growth.
With the advent of agriculture, extensive areas of plowed soil have greatly expanded the opportunities for such plants.
Other Articles About Plants
Plant Propagation—Learn about the various methods of producing new plants.
Using Seeds To Grow New Plants—Growing from seeds is the most common method of growing new plants. It's not difficult, but there's lots to successful germination and transplanting to your gardens.
3 Easy Steps To Growing Your Own Plants From Seed—This article includes a discussion of the equipment you'll need.
Easy Fall Propagation Techniques—Learn how to propagate evergreens and deciduous trees.
Unusual Plant Propagation—Learn how to propagate unusual and less common plants.
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