Science - Podcast Research

  RESEARCH





After visiting the botanical garden and asking ourselves all these questions we continued to research the need for these plants and their main uses. The information that we discovered was that around 80% of the world’s population depends directly on plant based medicines for health care and because of this many botanical gardens play a large role in medical plant study and research, cultivation and conservation. As this information was really interesting we decided to base our podcast on plants and their uses this medicine and general health care.

We were able to gather and learn a lot of interesting things about medicinal plants.
Medicinal plants harvested from the wild Provide both a relief from illness and a source of income, over 70,000 plant species are thought to be medicinal. Loss of habitat combined with over-harvesting threatens the survival of many of these plant species. Luckily one of the Botanic gardens main jobs is to ensure their conservation. The first botanical gardens originated in Europe in the sixteenth century. The reason for this was the cultivation and study of medicinal plants - at a time when medicine and botany were essentially the same discipline. The tradition of cultivating and displaying medicinal plants has been continued by many botanic gardens across the world which is shown by BGCI study in 1998 highlighting the medicinal plant collections of 480 botanic gardens. Botanic gardens provide a permanent location around which an infrastructure can develop. Around the world, they have become centers for the research and study of disciplines as diverse as taxonomy, ecology, agronomy, horticulture, ethnobotany and habitat restoration, all of which inform medicinal plant conservation.

Botanic gardens have a long-standing connection to medicinal plants in particular, since the sole purpose of all early botanic gardens was to grow and study medicinal plants. They are inherently well-placed to respond to the very specific local conservation needs of medicinal plants and the people who rely on them for health and livelihood in a particular region. Moreover, they are probably the most important agencies for the conservation of native medicinal plants, since plants are not often the priority of other conservation bodies and government agencies related to agriculture pay little attention to those species of undetermined economic use. BGCI maintains the PlantSearch database which records data on plants in botanic garden collections. As of August 2007 the PlantSearch database held details on over 2,540 botanic gardens, 681 of which have uploaded their species data, totalling 505,000 records of approximately 140,000 different taxa. The database is available for public use, although garden addresses are only accessible after requesting further information from the garden itself, due to the valuable nature of some of the plants held.