What do you call the study of plants?

Botany, and for most of its history it was not a branch of natural history so much as a branch of medicine - the study of which plants heal and which kill. The earliest herbals are pharmacies, and the first university botanic gardens, at Pisa and Padua in the 1540s, were teaching gardens for medical students.

It produced the naming system the whole of biology now uses. Carl Linnaeus, a botanist, imposed order on a chaos of long descriptive Latin names by giving every organism two words, genus and species - which is why a plant, a beetle and a whale are all named the same way. He also classified plants by their sexual parts, which was accurate and scandalous enough that some contemporaries thought it unfit for women to study.

The field has a persistent visibility problem, formally named plant blindness in the 1990s: people simply do not register plants as individual living things the way they register animals, and conservation funding follows attention. This is awkward, given that plants are around 80 per cent of the biomass on Earth, and that the great majority of botanical species have never been examined for anything useful.