Horticulture

Horticulture is the science, technology, art, and business of cultivating and using plants to improve human life. Horticulturists and Horticultural Scientists create global solutions for safe, sustainable, nutritious food and healthy, restorative, and beautiful environments. This definition is seen in its etymology, which is derived from the Latin words hortus, which means "garden" and cultura which means "to cultivate".^[1] There are various divisions of horticulture because plants are grown for a variety of purposes.^[2] These divisions include, but are not limited to: gardening, plant production/propagation, arboriculture, landscaping, floriculture and turf maintenance. For each of these, there are various professions, aspects, tools used and associated challenges; Each requiring highly specialized skills and knowledge of the horticulturist.

Typically, horticulture is characterized as the ornamental, small-scale/non-industrial cultivation of plants, as compared to the large-scale cultivation of crops/livestock that is seen in agriculture. However, there are aspects of horticulture that are industrialized/commercial such as greenhouse production across the globe.

Horticulture began with the domestication of plants around 10,000-20,000 years ago.^[3][4] At first, only plants for sustenance were grown and maintained, but eventually as humanity became increasingly sedentary, plants were grown for their ornamental value. Horticulture is considered to have diverged from agriculture during the middle-ages when people started growing plants for pleasure/aesthetics, rather than just for sustenance.^[5]

Emerging technologies are moving the industry forward, especially in the way of altering plants to be more adverse to parasites, disease and drought. Modifying technologies such as Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR/Cas9), are also improving the nutrition, taste and yield of crops.

There are many horticultural organizations and societies found around the world, that are formed by horticulturists and those within the industry. These include: The Royal Horticultural Society, International Society for Horticultural Science,^[6] The American Society of Horticultural Science,^[7] The Horticultural Society of India, The Global Horticulture Initiative, The Chartered Institute of Horticulture and The Australian Society of Horticultural Science.