Plants — the base of nearly every food chain.
11 topics · 11 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Insectivorous Plants
Charles Darwin · 1875
Shows through hundreds of feeding experiments on sundews and Venus flytraps that some plants digest captured insects with a process functionally like…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects
Charles Darwin · 1862
Argues each orchid's elaborate flower structure is a mechanical device shaped by selection to force visiting insects into cross-pollinating it, using…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Species Plantarum
Carl Linnaeus · 1753
Assigns every known plant species a standard two-part Latin name, replacing long descriptive phrases with a stable naming system still used as…
+5 more at this level
11 works
Charles Darwin
Shows through hundreds of feeding experiments on sundews and Venus flytraps that some plants digest captured insects with a process functionally like animal digestion, and argues carnivory evolved because it lets a plant supplement poor soil nitrogen.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Charles Darwin
Argues each orchid's elaborate flower structure is a mechanical device shaped by selection to force visiting insects into cross-pollinating it, using the flower's engineering as further evidence for natural selection.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Charles Darwin & Francis Darwin
Argues that a plant's shoot tip detects light and directs the curving growth response of the whole seedling, locating the movement in a transmissible signal rather than in the bending region itself.
about 13 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Norman E. Borlaug
Argues that breeding short-stemmed, fertiliser-responsive wheat varieties averted famine across Asia and Latin America, while warning the gains bought only a temporary reprieve unless population growth was also addressed.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Gary J. Martin
Sets out how to record plant knowledge held by a community as rigorous science rather than anecdote, and argues that documenting it is inseparable from the question of who owns the resulting knowledge.
Carl Linnaeus
Assigns every known plant species a standard two-part Latin name, replacing long descriptive phrases with a stable naming system still used as botany's official starting point today.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Melvin Calvin & Andrew A. Benson
Uses radioactive carbon-14 to trace the sequence of compounds formed during photosynthesis, establishing the carbon-fixation cycle now named for Calvin.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Barbara McClintock
Reports genetic elements in maize that can move from one chromosomal location to another and switch neighbouring genes on or off, challenging the assumption that a gene's position in the genome is fixed.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Katherine Esau
Sets out the structure of plant tissues and organs as a developmental sequence rather than a fixed catalogue, becoming the standard reference for how a plant is actually built.
Clayton Person
Formalises Flor's observation that resistance in a plant and virulence in its pathogen are matched gene for gene, giving plant pathology a genetic model for why a resistant variety eventually fails.
Lincoln Taiz, Eduardo Zeiger, Ian Max Møller & Angus Murphy
Treats a plant as a set of integrated physiological systems - water transport, photosynthesis, hormone signalling, growth - and is the standard text the field is taught from.