Crash Course Botany

The world of plants may seem quiet and calm.

But you dont need to go much farther than your front door to find drama afoot.

Like, that sweet, summery scent of freshly cut grass?

Its actually the plant equivalent of a scream.

Through chemicals, grass is sounding a warning call to nearby plants, which start putting up their defensive dukes, getting ready to protect themselves from damage.

And plants are smart.

They can tell the difference between mechanical damage, like that lawn mower, and being chomped by an insect.

If bugs are attacking, plants can release special chemicals that yell to other bugs nearby, "Please come eat whatever's eating me. So your quiet, summerafternoon has just turned into a plant action movie, complete with elaborate fight sequences.

We humans think were such a big deal, but if you squished up every living thing on the planet into one big ball, eighty percent of it would be plants, andless than one percent would be mammals.

Some folks say were missing the forestfor the trees, but were also missing the trees!

And the ferns, and the mosses, andthe palms and the sedges.

Theres a whole other world here, and its all around us.

You see, plants arent just a bunch of wallflowers.

You just werent a part of theirgroup chat yet.

But thats all about to change, and they have so much dirt to dish out.

Hi!

I'm Alexis, and this is Crash Course Botany.

[THEME MUSIC] Botany is the scientific study ofplants.

That includes the huge ones, like towering 300-foot tall coastal redwoodtrees, and the tiny ones, like Wolffia globosa: green globs the size of a candy sprinkle.

It includes the tasty plants, like sweet corn and mangoes; the super-stinky plants, like the corpseflower; and the super-stinky and tasty plants, like the durian.

There are plants that looklike brains, plants that look like rocks, even plants that look like Demogorgons.

Botany is all about this kaleidoscope of plant life.

Its the science ofplants structure and their function, the way their parts work and how their genetictraits pass on.

But its also about plants relationship to other living things, including us.

And its no overstatement to say our lives and the lives of every other creature on Earth depend onplants.

Youve probably heard of photosynthesis, the chemical process that plantsuse to turn water, sunlight, and carbon dioxide into energy for them to live on.

Well, the oxygen that comes out of that process is a byproduct, or something thats made by the nature of the process, not on purpose.

And that incidental byproduct just happens tobe the thing we evolved to breathe.

Which, when you stop to think about it, is pretty amazing.

Plants also cycle water and nutrients that all living things need between the soiland the atmosphere and back again.

Even a single tree can be an all-in-onebed-and-breakfast for dozens of organisms.

Like a fully alive combination Airbnb and Taco Bell.

In fact, once you start noticing how deepthis plants are connected to everything business goes, its hard to stop.

Plants arenot just in your garden or your bathtub or the woods behind your house.

Theyre in nearlyeverything.

Lets head to the Thought Bubble From the moment you wake up, youre already intouch with plants because you spent all night wrapped up in sheets made of cotton fibers.

Stumble into the shower, and plants are there, too.

You grab a luffa, which is actually adried-out tropical gourd.

Give yourself a scrub and you come out smelling like a rose becausethe oils in your soap came from roses.

Your toothpaste contains cellulose gum, thesame stuff that plants cell walls are made of.

And its spiced with a little flavor from amint plant.

Your floss glides against your gums with the help of carnauba wax, which comes from palm tree leaves.

And when you spot a little volcano erupting on your chin, you dabon some acne medication.

Itll work its magic thanks to oil from the Australian tea tree.

Youre running late by now, but theres still time to get some breakfast.

The kitchen smellslike freshly-brewed coffee, made from beans of the Coffea plant, and you grab some avocado toast acombo of wheat grown to be pest-resistant, spread with the insides of a big, green, buttery berry.

Triple-threat that you are, you grab your baseball bat (made from a maple tree), your clarinet (made from an African blackwood tree), and your lines for the play (printed on paperfrom a pine tree).

And dont forget to dodge falling acorns on the way out.

This is aplants world; youre just living in it.

Thanks, Thought Bubble.

For most of humans time on Earth, we gathered plants from thewild.

See a berry, eat a berry.

Find some tubers, share em with your friends.

But aroundten thousand years ago, some of us struck up a deal with plants: Hey, well stash yourseeds and help you grow on purpose.

In return, give us food we dont have to wander for. This alliance with plants was a history-bending, society-shaping big deal.

It changed howpeople related to food and to each other, turning some people into farmers and some plantsinto crops.

Which, in the case of teosintes transformation into corn, was a major makeover.

We call it the Neolithic Revolution.

Agriculture turned small, mobile groups of people into big,permanent settlements, where more food was grown, supporting more people.

Soon those people startedsplitting up work, so only some people were in charge of growing food while others becameshopkeepers, restaurateurs, and YouTubers.

And, over time, this allowed human populationsto grow dramatically.

Eventually, thanks to the powers of agriculture and transportationcombined, people could choose to live in cities or rural areas, because foods couldbe predictably produced and moved to people, instead of people moving to them.

So agriculture is a big part of theplant-and-people story.

But there are lots of other ways weve used plants: asmedicines and poisons, in our clothes and shelter.

And the big field of botany is shaped by diverse ways of relating to and knowing plants.

Like, all over the world, IndigenousPeoples have passed on generational knowledge of plants local to them.

Forexample, the Hidatsa gardener Maxidiwiac, also known as Buffalo Bird Woman, helped recordher tribes ways of growing corn, squash, beans, and sunflowers in the early 1900s usingpractices gardeners still follow today.

Botany has also been shaped by the knowledge ofenslaved people throughout history, like Edmond Albius.

In the 1840s, when Albius was only twelveyears old and enslaved on the island of Runion, he invented a way of pollinating vanilla plants byhand, making it possible to grow them profitably.

Albius was freed a few years later, when slaverywas abolished on the island.

To this day, vanilla growers still use his techniques.

People like Maxidiwiac and Albius had a secret weapon in their arsenal: close observation andknowledge of plants.

And anyone can develop it, in the form of botanical literacy.

Thats informationthat helps you read the language of the plant world and understand the science surrounding it.

Like, remember when I said plants use sunlight for photosynthesis?

Well, the leaves of living stoneplants found mostly in hot, dry areas of Africa, act like fiber optic cables they bringsunlight underground so that the plant can perform photosynthesis where it's cooler.

Or another thing speaking the language of plants lets you in on: some orchids canproduce bee-shaped flowers which fake bees out so that theyll pollinate what they think are potential mates.

With botanical literacy, you can also give anappropriate amount of side-eye to a package of Himalayan salt thats labeled not geneticallymodified. Genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, are living things with genes that have been altered in ways that dont happen in nature.

Like, scientists have created insect-resistantGMO crops by giving them genes from soil bacteria genes they wouldnt be able to obtain just by breeding with other plants.

So that non-GMO salt label doesnt make sense.

Becausesalt is a mineral, not a plant or an animal, and has no genes to modify to begin with.

Wellbe getting more into GMOs in a later episode.

The point is: botany is about much more than knowing your begonias from your bougainvilleas.

Although that part can be fun, too.

But if youve never really noticed plants before, youre not alone.

[TV static] Do plants just fade into the backgroundfor you?

Because theyre mostly green, do you tend to lump their features together intoa solid wall of color?

Are you, like other humans, drawn to things that move and look like you?

Well,you might just have plant awareness disparity.

The cure is watching Crash Course Botany.

So, yeah, plants are like the elephant in the room.

Even that phrase doesnt referenceplants.

Can we coin a new version?

When somethings like right in front of you, but no ones talking about it, lets call it the bamboo in the room. The tomatoin the room? The giant redwood in the room. Because when we dont take heed of the bustlingcommunity of shoots, vines, and leaves around us, we allow sneaky false assumptions to takeroot instead.

We start to think things like, Plants dont do anything, or Humans are runningthis show. But if youve ever broken out in welts from brushing against poison ivy, or seen atelephone pole swallowed up by a Kudzu vine, well, you know plants do things.

Andwere not as in control as we think.

The truth is, plants do perceive and react to theworld around them just not in the ways people do.

They have their own ways of communicatingand sensing information, which botany can help us tune into and understand.

Like, plants cant move when a threat is around.

But they can share information aboutincoming danger.

When a plant isnt getting enough to drink, for example, tiny openings onits leaves called stomata start to close up to conserve water.

Signals about their stressedstate can pass to any neighboring plants that touch roots, so those plants know to preparefor drought by closing their stomata, too.

Botanists only recently learned and are stilllearning about how roots allow plant communication to happen just beyond our perception.

So ifyou havent thought much about plants yet, theres still time.

Theyre waiting for you.

And possibly gossiping about you.

To find out, you need to get in the group chat.

It can be easy not to pay plants much notice ineveryday life.

But youre connected to them all the same.

Without plants, you wouldnt just not have hot cocoa or chalupas you wouldnt be alive.

None of us would be.

And theres much to be gained by turning your attention to plants.

Plantsshelter us, clothe us, medicate us, feed us, and oxygenate us.

Weve structured our civilizations around them, and they, in turn, make life possible for us and other organisms.

By studying plants, we can understand forces that shape our lives and tune into the quietcommunication thats happening all around us.