Botany

If you have ever pinched the tip out of a fuchsia to make it bushy, hardened off seedlings before planting them out, or cursed a row of lettuces that shot up into flower in a hot spell, you have already done a fair amount of botany. You just haven’t had the names for it. This book gives you the names, and the reasons behind them. Botany is the study of what plants are made of, how they work, how they reproduce and how they are related. For a gardener, it is the difference between following rules and understanding them. Rules are useful until a plant does something the rule didn’t mention; understanding lets you look at a yellowing leaf, a lopsided seedling or a holly with no berries and work out what is going on. What you’ll discover • Cells, growing points, and why pinching out and hard pruning work as they do • Roots, stems and leaves, including bulbs, corms, tubers, tendrils and bracts mistaken for petals • Photosynthesis, respiration and light, with a plain explanation of daily light integral • How plants move water, what wilting really means, and sensible watering rules • Nutrients, soil, pH and deficiency symptoms, plus mycorrhizal fungi and nitrogen-fixing bacteria • Plant hormones, rooting cuttings, ripening fruit and why seedlings lean towards the window • Day length, winter cold and dormancy, and why crops bolt • Flowers and pollination, seeds, fruits, life cycles, F1 hybrids and inheritance • Plant defences, poisonous plants, how diseases get in, and some unusual ways of making a living • Plant families, how botanical names work and why they change, plus simple home experiments A book without pictures There are deliberately no illustrations: the best picture of a plant is the plant. Each structure is described alongside something you can find today. A…