There seem to have been no national ceremonies to mark the end of botany.
A discipline that had flourished in our universities for centuries – the first Oxford professor of botany, Robert Morison, was awarded his chair in 1669 – slipped away quietly into oblivion in 2013, with the graduation of the last students on the last undergraduate botany course, at Bristol.
You can’t do a botany degree in Britain any more. A once familiar element of life has simply disappeared, quite unremarked upon. Like the disappearance of hitchhiking, you might say.
Of course, people still engage in the study of plants, and a handful of universities offer first degrees in plant science, but the vanishing of the B-word signifies much more than a shift in nomenclature.
The Guardian: Plants are our lifeline – but we’re letting them die
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