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This article contains a list of useful plants, meaning a plant that has been or can be co-opted by humans to fulfill a particular need. Rather than listing all plants on one page, this page instead collects the lists and categories for the different ways in which a plant can be used; some plants may fall into several of the categories or lists ...
Botany is a natural science concerned with the study of plants.The main branches of botany (also referred to as "plant science") are commonly divided into three groups: core topics, concerned with the study of the fundamental natural phenomena and processes of plant life, the classification and description of plant diversity; applied topics which study the ways in which plants may be used for ...
Human uses of plants include both practical uses, such as for food, clothing, and medicine, and symbolic uses, such as in art, mythology and literature. Materials derived from plants are collectively called plant products .
Botanical nomenclature is the formal, scientific naming of plants. It is related to, but distinct from taxonomy. Plant taxonomy is concerned with grouping and classifying plants; botanical nomenclature then provides names for the results of this process.
Among these are plants that have been used for food and other uses on a larger scale historically, but whose usage has dropped in modern times. Reduction in use is due to supply or consumption constraints, poor shelf life , unrecognised nutritional value, poor consumer awareness , and perception as famine food ("poor people's food"), partially ...
The scientific name of a plant represents its genus and its species within the genus, resulting in a single worldwide name for each organism. [199] For example, the tiger lily is Lilium columbianum. Lilium is the genus, and columbianum the specific epithet. The combination is the name of the species.
Once a plant specimen has been identified, its name and properties are known. Plant classification is the placing of known plants into groups or categories to show some relationship. Scientific classification follows a system of rules that standardizes the results, and groups successive categories into a hierarchy.
While many plants have been used for food, a small number of staple crops including wheat, rice, and maize provide most of the food in the world today. In turn, animals provide much of the meat eaten by the human population, whether farmed or hunted, and until the arrival of mechanised transport, terrestrial mammals provided a large part of the ...