Topic F

Horticulture and Crop Topics

This section collects crop profiles and the plant science behind horticultural practices. Specific plants such as Phalaenopsis, tomato, strawberry, and rice connect back to the A-E foundations.

Crop profilesHorticultural conceptsPhalaenopsis topic

A concept image for Phalaenopsis orchids and horticultural crop topics

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Connect Phalaenopsis to plant science

From variety names to plant breeding

Showing 28 of 28 articles

Plant and crop profiles

What Is a Phalaenopsis Orchid?

Phalaenopsis orchids are familiar moth orchids with thick leaves, fleshy aerial roots, short stems, and showy flower spikes. This beginner guide explains their structure without turning it into a care prescription.

Plant and crop profiles

What Is a Rice Plant?

Learn what a rice plant is: Oryza sativa, a monocot grass with fibrous roots, culms, leaf sheaths, tillers, panicles, spikelets, and caryopsis fruits.

Plant and crop profiles

What Is a Corn Plant?

What is a corn plant? Learn how maize fits the grass family, from its culm, leaves, tassel, ear, and silks to pollination, caryopsis kernels, and seeds.

Plant and crop profiles

What Is a Tomato Plant?

Learn what a tomato plant is in botany: Solanum lycopersicum, nightshade family, compound leaves, yellow flowers, pollination, berry fruit, and seeds.

Plant and crop profiles

What Is a Strawberry Plant?

Learn what a garden strawberry is: a low-growing herbaceous perennial with a crown, trifoliate leaves, runners, flower clusters, and a fleshy receptacle covered with achenes.

Plant and crop profiles

What Is a Potato Plant? A Guide to Tubers, Eyes, Flowers, and Seeds

A clear guide to potato plants: why a potato tuber is an underground stem, what its eyes are, how tubers form, and how flowers, fruit, and true seeds fit in.

Plant and crop profiles

What Is a Cabbage Plant? From a Leafy Head to Flowers

A clear guide to common cabbage: what the leafy head is made of, why its stem looks short, and how the plant can later bolt, flower, and form seed pods.

Plant and crop profiles

What Is the Tea Plant?

The true tea plant, Camellia sinensis, is an evergreen woody shrub or small tree. Explore its branches, simple serrated leaves, axillary white flowers, capsule fruit, seeds, and life cycle.

Plant and crop profiles

What Is a Sunflower Plant?

What is a sunflower plant? Learn how Helianthus annuus forms a capitulum from ray and disc florets, develops cypselae, completes an annual life cycle, and tracks sunlight when young.

Plant and crop profiles

What Is Pothos?

Pothos (Epipremnum aureum) can trail or climb. Learn how nodes, aerial roots, mature leaves, and variegation explain its changing form.

Breeding and varieties

What Is Plant Breeding? Selection vs Breeding in Plain Language

Plant breeding is more than picking one good-looking plant. Learn how selection, parent plants, traits, offspring, hybrids, seeds, and vegetative propagation fit together.

Breeding and varieties

Species, Variety, Cultivar, and Strain: What Do Plant Names Mean?

Learn how species, species plants, botanical variety, cultivar, trade names, and plant lines or strains describe different layers of identity on plant labels.

Breeding and varieties

Parent Plants, Hybrids, and Traits: How Are They Connected?

Learn what parent plants, seed and pollen parents, hybrids, F1 generations, traits, phenotype, genotype, and later offspring differences mean in plant labels.