Office Plants In Profile Ten of The Best

History Of Gardening ... After the emergence of the first civilizations, wealthy individuals began to create gardens for purely aesthetic purposes. Egyptian tomb paintings of the 1500s BC are some of the earliest physical evidence of ornamental horticulture and landscape design; they depict lotus ponds surrounded by symmetrical rows of acacias and palms...

Spermatophyte ... A middle Devonian precursor to seed plants from Belgium has been identified predating the earliest seed plants by about 20 million years... Runcaria has all of the qualities of seed plants except for a solid seed coat and a system to guide the pollen to the seed... Relationships and nomenclature Further information: Gnetophyta#Classification Seed-bearing plants were traditionally divided into angiosperms, or flowering plants, and gymnosperms, which includes the gnetophytes, cycads, ginkgo, and conifers...

Paleobotany ... Paleobotany has also become important to the field of archaeology, primarily for the use of phytoliths in relative dating and in paleoethnobotany, Overview of the paleobotanical record Macroscopic remains of true vascular plants are first found in the fossil record during the Silurian Period of the Paleozoic era... Some dispersed, fragmentary fossils of disputed affinity, primarily spores and cuticles, have been found in rocks from the Ordovician Period in Oman, and are thought to derive from liverwort- or moss-grade fossil plants (Wellman, Osterloff & Mohiuddin 2003)...

Shrub ... Shrubs as a botanical structural form In botany and ecology a shrub is more specifically used to describe the particular physical structural or plant life-form of woody plants which are less than 8 metres (26 ft) high and usually have many stems arising at or near the base...

Plant ... Precise numbers are difficult to determine, but as of 2010, there are thought to be 300–315 thousand species of plants, of which the great majority, some 260–290 thousand, are seed plants (see the table below)... Definition Plants are one of the two groups into which all living things have been traditionally divided; the other is animals... The division goes back at least as far as Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) who distinguished between plants which generally do not move, and animals which often are mobile to catch their food...

Fern ... The term pteridophyte also refers to ferns and a few other seedless vascular plants (see classification section below)... Ferns first appear in the fossil record 360 million years ago in the Carboniferous but many of the current families and species did not appear until roughly 145 million years ago in the early Cretaceous (after flowering plants came to dominate many environments)...

Bryophyte ... Although a 2005 study supported the traditional view that the bryophytes form a monophyletic group, the preponderance of currently available evidence suggests that the hornworts are sister to vascular plants and liverworts are sister to all other land plants, as shown in the cladogram below... embryophytes tracheophytes hornworts mosses liverworts bryophytes When extinct plants are taken into account, the picture is slightly altered... There are extinct land plants, such as the horneophytes, which are not bryophytes, but also are not vascular plants since like bryophytes they do not have true vascular tissue...

Evolutionary History Of Plants ... By the middle of the Devonian Period most of the features recognised in plants today are present, including roots, leaves and secondary wood, and by late Devonian times seeds had evolved... Late Devonian plants had thereby reached a degree of sophistication that allowed them to form forests of tall trees...

Tree ... The majority of tree species grow in tropical regions of the world and many of these areas have not been surveyed yet by botanists, making species diversity and ranges poorly understood.t The earliest tree-like organisms were tree ferns, horsetails and lycophytes, which grew in forests in the Carboniferous period, however these were plants were not trees, since they lacked woody tissue... Trees evolved in the Triassic period, with conifers, ginkgos, cycads and other gymnosperms appeared producing woody tissue, and were subsequently followed by tree-form flowering plants in the Cretaceous period...

Light-dependent Reactions ... The light-dependent reactions take place on the thylakoid membrane inside a chloroplast. The inside of the thylakoid membrane is called the lumen, and outside the thylakoid membrane is the stroma, where the light-independent reactions take place...

French Landscape Garden ... Descriptions of English gardens were first brought to France by the Abbé LeçBlanc, who published accounts of his voyage in 1745 and 1751. A treatise on the English garden, Observations on Modern Gardening, written by Thomas Whately and published in London in 1770, was translated into French in 1771...

Phytochemistry ... Constituent elements The list of simple elements of which plants are primarily constructed—carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, calcium, phosphorus, etc.—is not different from similar lists for animals, fungi, or even bacteria... The fundamental atomic components of plants are the same as for all life; only the details of the way in which they are assembled differs...

Plant Life-form ... Plant construction types may be used in a broader sense to emcompass planktophytes, benthophytes (mainly algae) and terrestrial plants... History The term life-form was first coined by Eugenius Warming ("livsform") in his 1895 book Plantesamfund, but was translated to "growthform" in the 1909 English version Oecology of Plants... The classification was based on his meticulous observations while raising wild plants from seed in the Copenhagen Botanical Garden...

Photomorphogenesis ... Typically, plants are responsive to wavelengths of light in the blue, red and far-red regions of the spectrum through the action of several different photosensory systems... Photoreceptor systems in plants Plants use phytochrome to detect and respond to red and far-red wavelengths...

Plant Pathology ... The fungi reproduce both sexually and asexually via the production of spores and other structures. Spores may be spread long distances by air or water, or they may be soil borne...

Issues Relating To Biofuels ... According to Francisco Blanch, a commodity strategist for Merrill Lynch, crude oil would be trading 15 per cent higher and gasoline would be as much as 25 per cent more expensive, if it were not for biofuels. Gordon Quaiattini, president of the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association, argued that a healthy supply of alternative energy sources will help to combat gasoline price spikes...

Photosynthesis ... Eventually, no later than a billion years ago, one of these protists formed a symbiotic relationship with a cyanobacterium, producing the ancestor of many plants and algae...

Shrubland ... Shrubland species generally show a wide range of adaptations to fire, such as heavy seed production, lignotubers, and fire-induced germination. Shrubland as a botanical structural form In botany and ecology a shrub is defined as a much-branched woody plant less than 8 m high and usually with many stems...

Herbivore ... Herbivory usually refers to animals eating plants; fungi, bacteria and protists that feed on living plants are usually termed plant pathogens (plant diseases),and microbes that feed on dead plants are saprotrophs...

Gardening ... Gardening ranges in scale from fruit orchards, to long boulevard plantings with one or more different types of shrubs, trees and herbaceous plants, to residential yards including lawns and foundation plantings, to plants in large or small containers grown inside or outside... Gardening may be very specialized, with only one type of plant grown, or involve a large number of different plants in mixed plantings...

Hedge ... Many hedgerows separating fields from lanes in the United Kingdom, Ireland and the Low Countries are estimated to have been in existence for more than seven hundred years, originating in the medieval period. The root word of 'hedge' is much older: it appears in the Old English language, in German (Hecke), and Dutch (haag) to mean 'enclosure', as in the name of the Dutch city The Hague, or more formally 's Gravenhage, meaning The Count's hedge...

Medieval Gardening ... For the purposes of this article, the European medieval era will be considered to span from 400 to 1400 CE, though appropriate references may be made to earlier and later times. Gardening is the deliberate cultivation of plants herbs, fruits, flowers, or vegetables...

Lawn ... The term lawn, referring to a managed grass space, dates to no earlier than the 16th century. Tied to suburban expansion and the creation of the household aesthetic, the lawn is an important aspect of the interaction between the natural environment and the constructed urban and suburban space...

Phytogeography ... Gross patterns of the distribution of plants became apparent early on in the study of plant geography...