“To see … Heaven in a Wild Flower….”: Teaching botany in the 21st century

Is teaching about plants still important and necessary in the 21st century? Stories of low enrollments in basic undergraduate botany courses and the demise of botany departments or botany curricula circulate through the plant science community, causing nail biting and reevaluations. The answer to the question, however, is as close as your next meal, the clothes next to your skin, or your next walk in the woods. Knowledge of how plants grow and where they fit into the world is fundamental to coping with universal problems, such as world nutrition and global warming. In his book Eloge de la Plante (1999) Francis Halle considers what would happen to the world if all the animals suddenly disappeared as compared to a scenario where all the plants evaporated. Either event would cause immediate changes in what the world is like, but if the animals disappeared, the plants would probably survive, while the converse is not true. Botanical knowledge also enhances our understanding and appreciation of our world and improves the quality of many people's lives, as the perennial popularity of gardening, garden clubs, and plant interest groups indicates (Crespon et al., 1996; Bhatti and Church, 2001). In addition, the popularity of books such as The Botany of Desire (Pollan, 2001) illustrates the fascination plants have for the general public. Given this basic need and interest, as well as the enormous strides being made in our scientific understanding of plant systematics, development and ecology, why are plant scientists worried? Partly, the appeal of plants is not intuitive in the warm fuzzy (or even wet slimy) way that animals are. Plants are an alien life form to us. Although similarities exist biochemically between plants and animals (but then, there is photosynthesis), the cell, tissue, and organ levels of organization and the ecological interactions of plants differ substantially from those of most animals and therefore require more education to understand and appreciate. Perhaps because of this essential strangeness, plant biology is often poorly taught in kindergarten through high school, except that plant immobility and restrictions on the use of animals in experiments means that some aspect of growing plants often crops up in science fair projects. With the increasing concentration of population in urban and suburban environments, our daily interactions with plants are more controlled and less diverse than at any time in the history of humankind, so students arrive at college with less direct experience of plants than in former times. For students who have some knowledge of plants, their awareness often comes from some relative's enjoyment of gardening, or they have experienced the beauty of natural landscapes framed by plants during vacations, school outings, or visits to urban and suburban parks. How, then, does plant education fare in our universities? An introduction to the plant kingdom is always included in basic undergraduate biology texts (e.g., Purves et al., 2001; Raven and Johnson, 2002; and many others). Most of these courses cover photosynthesis and plant morphology, growth, and development. For a person interested in learning about plants, general biology might be followed by an introductory botany course, or, alternatively, students could immediately enroll in more specialized courses, such as plant morphology, systematics, or physiology. In addition, many universities offer nonmajor botany courses to fulfill general science requirements; these assume no scientific background. Traditionally, all of these introductory courses are taught with a textbook. Current books on the market include The Biology of Plants, 6th ed. (Raven, Evert, and Eichhorn, 1999), Botany-An Introduction to Plant Biology, 2nd ed. (Mauseth, 1998), Botany, 2nd ed. (Moore, Clark, and Vodopich, 1998), Plant Biology (Rost et al., 1998), Introductory Plant Biology (Stern, 1997), Introductory Botany-Plants, People and the Environment (Berg, 1997), or Plants and Society (Levetin and McMahon, 1999). The first five of these are suitable for science majors but try to be accessible to nonmajors, while the last two focus on nonmajors. They all cover plant cells and cell division, plant morphology and anatomy, plant physiology, genetics, plant life cycles, and classification at some level. They all are amply illustrated with color photographs and diagrams, and they all supply computerized test banks and teaching aids, such as overhead transparencies or CD-ROMs and Web site references or tie-ins. Alternatives to these classical texts that are aimed at non-