Horticulture and horticultural science, an essay

Abstract

This publication is an interim edition. It is a draft piece of writing which we hope to work on further. The work is not complete in some areas and several aspects of horticulture remain to be discussed. Because we wish to use this work for teaching in Semester 2, 1992, (especially for students beginning BIOS 105), we saw the need to release this work partially complete. Our intention is to build on this work to provide a more complete description of horticulture. The final readership will be quite varied. Students will be one group that we think this work will assist. However, we hope that there will many other interested groups who wish to understand that horticulture is a distinctive subject. In this work we want to show that horticulture is unusual in being a subject embracing science, technology and the arts. We want to show that horticulture has a fascinating and robust history. We want to show that it is a subject which has had men and women, from all ranks of life, play a role. We want to show that horticulture has a challenging future and a great future if vision is allowed to prevail.