horticulture

The business of growing fruit, vegetables, flowers, and shrubs for pleasure or for commercial marketing; also practised widely as a hobby and an art form. It is usually associated with the intensive production of high-value crops, and often involves the use of irrigation in drier areas, and glass or polythene protection in cooler areas. Glass or polythene houses may be heated to allow all-year-round production, and polythene tunnels are becoming increasingly popular as a means of bringing on early crops. Much horticultural research is conducted at experimental stations, arboretums, botanical gardens, and colleges and universities. Horticultural research studies ways of improving cultivation and controlling plant disease and pests, as well as the breeding of plants to produce new varieties that are especially beautiful, hardy, or productive.

The Latin words hortus (garden plant) and cultura (culture) together form horticulture, classically defined as the culture or growing of garden plants. Horticulturists work in plant propagation, crop production, plant breeding and genetic engineering, plant biochemistry, plant physiology, and the storage, processing, and transportation of fruits, berries, nuts, vegetables, flowers, trees, shrubs, and turf. These areas are floriculture (includes production and marketing of floral crops), landscape horticulture (includes production, marketing and maintenance of landscape plants), olericulture (includes production and marketing of vegetables), pomology (includes production and marketing of fruits), and postharvest physiology (involves maintaining quality and preventing spoilage of horticultural crops). They can be cropping systems engineers, wholesale or retail business managers, propagators and tissue culture specialists (fruits, vegetables, ornamentals, and turf), crop inspectors, crop production advisors, extension specialists, plant breeders, research scientists, and of course, teachers. Plant science and horticulture courses include: plant materials, plant propagation, tissue culture, crop production, post-harvest handling, plant breeding, pollination management, crop nutrition, entomology, plant pathology, economics, and business.