botany

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. The science or study of plants.
2. n. A book or scholarly work on this subject.
3. n. The plant life of a particular area: the botany of the Ohio River valley.
4. n. The characteristic features and biology of a particular kind of plant or plant group.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. The science of plants. It treats of the forms of plants, their structure, the nature of the tissues of which they are composed, the vital phenomena connected with them, the arrangement of them into larger and smaller groups according to their affinities, and the classification of these groups so as to exhibit their mutual relations and their position in the vegetable kingdom as a whole. The science further investigates the nature of the vegetation which at former epochs lived on the earth, as well as the distribution of plants at the present time. It is thus divided into several sections. Structural or morphological botany, that branch of the science of botany which relates to the structure and organization of plants, internal or external, independently of the presence of a vital principle. Also called organography.

Wiktionary

1. n. uncountable The scientific study of plants, a branch of biology. Typically those disciplines that involve the whole plant.
2. n. The plant life, or the properties and life phenomena exhibited by a plant, plant type, or plant group.
3. n. countable A botanical treatise or study, especially of a particular system of botany or that of a particular place.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. The science which treats of the structure of plants, the functions of their parts, their places of growth, their classification, and the terms which are employed in their description and denomination. See plant.
2. n. A book which treats of the science of botany.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. the branch of biology that studies plants
2. n. all the plant life in a particular region or period