Organic Gardeners Need to Understand Botany

Posted by Katie Elzer-Peters
February 18th, 2009
Filed in Organic Book Reviews
Tags: leaves, plants, vegetables

If you are an organic gardener, you do need to understand some basic botany.  I know that probably doesn’t fit with your life plan of actually enjoying your gardening and such, but, trust me-if you know some botany, you will have a much easier time.  I do recommend a resource.  Not because we want you to buy it, but, hey, if you want to. . . No, I recommend this book because it is actually a non-threatening and helpful resource for gardeners who would like to understand how their plants grow in order to grow more plants.  Huh?

Botany for Gardeners

If you really care about your plants, read Brian Capon’s excellent book Botany for Gardeners. You may not find yourself referring to it every single day, but reading it, digesting it and incorporating your newfound knowledge into your gardening routine.  There are many reasons why I would recommend this book over others.

• Reading this book is sort of like reading a biography of plants.  It details “episodes” in the life of a plant and “portraits” of plant parts: flowering to fruiting, inside stems, inside roots, etc.
• It is written in English-not Botanical Latin/ You need a Master’s Degree to read this gibberish.
• The book has great pictures and diagrams.  If you don’t like to read, you could get an entire education re: botany for gardening from the pictures and diagrams.

What Botany can do for You!

I frequently tout that a little bit of knowledge about the way plants work goes a long way toward helping gardeners achieve gardening success.  I think I feel this way because I always gardened when I was little, but once I went to school and learned how systems in plants functioned, I was much better able to take care of my plants.  I remember being in soil science class and finally understanding what all of the patterns in the soil were that I saw from the air.  (You know-when you fly across the flat midwest in the winter, and the fields are plowed, but it looks like there are different colored rivers of soil running across the land?)  My eyes were opened after I took woody plant identification-I no longer saw a bunch of trees, I saw specific tree species.  Botany is like this for gardeners.  Once you know how plants grow, you will stop doing the following:

• Pruning branches, leaving more than 1/2 inch of wood above an active bud.  You will learn that the space between buds (on most plants) doesn’t do anything but hang out and be dead.  The buds sprout.  Better to prune close to the buds.
• Feeding at the time of planting/transplanting.  You should NEVER feed your plants immediately when you plant them, as the salts in fertilizers can cause the plants to dry out.  (If you are truly an organic gardener, you should be amending the soil with compost first-the only real “slow release” fertilizer.)
• Letting your annuals go to seed. In June.  You will learn that once an annual plant sets seed, its life cycle is done.  That means no more flowers.  You will know that you can prolong flowering by “deadheading” and pinching off the flowers after they have faded and before they can produce seeds.
• Mowing too close to the tree.  When you learn botany, you will learn that the most important part of a tree is right underneath the bark.  That section is called the cambium, and it is where the cells through which food and water flow are on the tree.  If you tear a strip of bark off the tree all the way around the trunk, you will completely disrupt transport of water and food, killing the tree.

Those are just a few nuggets of great information in Botany for Gardeners. Of course, it is up to you to use your new-found knowledge.  However, once you do, you will want to know more and more about your plants.