The program was successful.
The program was a success. As you probably know, there are a lot of types of plants. If you went outside right now, you could find all kinds of prickly plants, fuzzy plants, floppy plants, plants with leaves shaped like hearts or teardrops, plants with colorful, spiky flowers, and even some that resemble monkey faces - well, only if you live in the higher altitudes of Peru or Ecuador. For that last one, there’s the banana you bought at the corner store, the ginger tea a loved one makes for you, and your stomach is upset.
While many plants are good to eat, others can be downright dangerous. It’s important to know the difference, but for us humans, it’s not enough to just know about plants - we need to communicate all this information to each other. What’s different? What’s the same? What’s dangerous or delicious about all the plants that surround us? After all, we don’t want anyone sipping the wrong tea.
So, we’ve come up with names and categories for plants to make sense of what we learn and to share that knowledge with others. These categories are simultaneously a super useful way of building knowledge and totally made up.
Hi, I’m Alexis and this is Crash Course Botany. There are hundreds of thousands of different types of plants, so what makes something a plant? All the plants we know today descended from the same ancestor - a teeny tiny green alga (that’s the singular for algae) that existed around 500 million years ago. It’s like how all people are technically related if you go back far enough in history.
What’s up, cousin?
And these algae descendants all have two things in common. First, they all start as single-celled zygotes made from a sperm cell and egg cell combo that become multicellular embryos - the tiny beginnings of roots, stems, and leaves. If you’ve ever looked close up at a seed or a bean, you’ve seen a capsule that contains an embryo. Given soil, sunshine, and half a chance, it can sprout into a tiny version of a grown-up plant.
Second, these things we call plants have complicated sex lives. Plants can reproduce in different ways and they tend to flip back and forth between them. One moment they’re popping sex cells with each other, another they’re releasing reproductive cells called spores. This cycling between sexual and asexual phases is called the alternation of generations and it helps keep plants flourishing, from granddaddy succulent to great grandbaby succulent and even beyond that.
While these two traits unite plants into one big category, botanists need to split that category into other smaller ones so that we can get to know the qualities of each type of plant and better understand how they’re related.
Imagine you collect Leafy Lovable - the hottest stuffed toys on the market. You know each one’s name by heart - Sunny Sunflower, Molly Moss, Theo Tomato - you get the picture, and you even talk about them with other collectors who know their Leafy Lovable by the same names. Everyone’s very impressed by your rare Ruby Riflesia.
That’s kind of like taxonomy - the science of classifying, naming, and describing organisms. Taxonomy gives scientists all over the world a common language for talking about living things, like how two people from Japan can communicate by speaking Japanese, or two pigs can communicate using Pig Latin (what? Oh, that’s not what Pig Latin is? Well, I never said I was a zoologist).
Like any serious Leafy Lovable fanatic, you have a special collector’s guide to help keep tabs on your collection - where you got them, when each one was released, and which ones have been discontinued. You might even hit up a collector’s fair to see how your Leafy Lovable fit into the bigger history of collectible things, from Beanie Babies and Squish Mallows to baseball cards and rare coins.
That’s kind of like systematics - the study of how organisms are related to each other. Systematics involves studying connections between organisms alive today and those that have been extinct for millions of years.
And sort of like organizing your stuffed plant collection, scientists use taxonomy and systematics to…