Plants are much older than the history that we are taught in school today. Over 3,000,000,000 years ago the first living-organism that resembled a plant appeared, even though it is said that the first ever plants were blue- algae, there was probably plants as small as bacteria before them. You can still find blue - green algae in the sea today. When plants first sprouted on the earth it was impossible for all oxygen breathing creatures to live here because there was not enough oxygen to go around. If it was not for plants, humans would not be alive; they are probably the most precious living organism on this earth today.
There is evidence that at around 35,000 BCE, Homo sapiens at the end of the Palaeolithic period knew about many plants, from food gathering techniques. The first evidence for plant domestication is around 10, 000 years old. In 3500 BCE the Egyptians started using irrigation techniques on their plants and crops. There are manuscripts from back in 3000 BCE that say that they started using plants for medicine; they are mainly from China, Mesopotamia and Egypt. In 1495 BCE Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt brought trees from conquered places in Northern Africa back to Egypt; many other Egyptian rulers had gardens and meadows as well.
After the reign of the Egyptians many other civilisations came along with their plants and then came the Greek philosopher Aristotle in 322 BCE. He wrote 26 treatises on natural science. Then Theophrastus inherited Aristotle's botanic garden in Athens, and many of Aristotle's treatises, Theophrastus is considered by some to be the "Father of Botany." In the year 812 Charlemagne, king of the French experimented with plants in a private garden and put plants on estates. In 1280 Marco Polo visited the palace garden of the Mogol ruler, Kubilai, in China. Then he said he visited the Hsi Hu imperial gardens in Hangchou, China. In 1543 botany professor Luca Ghini established the first botanical garden in Europe, in Pisa.
Throughout the seventeenth century and most of the eighteenth century their were not any major breakthroughs with plants, however in 1784 they sold seeds in paper packets for the very first time in New England. In the 1800’s all sorts of people were making their own gardens and many books came out for people about how to garden by themselves. In the 1900’s the amount of farmers started to drop even though by 1990 in the United States, they still had 4,500,000 farmers it was nothing compared to the 29,400,000 in 1900.
Today many people garden for pleasure they have plants, trees, flowers, bushes and much, much more in their front yards, backyards and even inside their houses. Plants are very common in houses and pretty much every household has a plant somewhere.
Our experiment, involves using household cleaners mixed in with water and feeding it to plants. We will see the effects that the household cleaner’s have on the plants and which household cleaner’s kill the plant’s fastest. The reason for this is that herbicides can be deadly to living organisms other than weeds. We would like to see if there is another way to get rid of the weeds without threatening the life of these other organisms.
Some important terms in the experiment are: fichus which are the type of plant that we will be using. Murphy’s household cleaner is one of the many household cleaner’s that we will be using, and the rest are, Bright n’ easy household cleaner, Mr. Clean household cleaner, Pine-Sol household cleaner, Fantastik all-purpose cleaner and Hertel all-purpose cleaner. Toxic, is an important word because we will be looking for the toxicity of the household cleaning products against living organisms. Living organism is an important term because it can mean many different things, but in this case the living organisms are the fichus.
A growing controversy is the use of herbicides to clear forests of weeds that conflict with the growth of endangered tree and plant species. What is controversial is that some herbicides work too effectively, and in some areas, the herbicides seep into the ground and prevent growth.
Another controversial issue is the fact that the herbicides are intended to kill, and many not only kill plants but animals, and sometimes even people as well. Herbicides are dangerous to the environment and are very difficult to control.
A great issue of our experiment is that plants have different biological structures than humans, so what is deadly for plants might not be deadly for humans. The different makeup of plant DNA might mean that they are immune to toxins that would kill humans, and vice versa.
Our main issue that we are trying to resolve is what household cleaners are safe for household use, as many cleaners are known to have very negative effects on health when they are in close proximity with living things. A safe household cleaner could resolve many controversies on the dangers of cleaning fluids.
The key issue in many laboratories is ethics of animal treatment. Although we are using plants, testing of household cleaners would be more effective if animals were used in the testing, because their results would be closer than plant results.
There is a very broad future for our topic, and much progress has been made in this field. There are now organic cleaners that are far less damaging to be used. These cleaners are also non-toxic, and some are actually healthy to use to clean, as opposed to the much more poisonous cleaners that most people use.
The downside is that these cleaners are far more expensive, and many can only be ordered over the internet. Another downside is that they do not get as much publicity as others, although with more research into this field, the popularity of household cleaners may grow.
Another future in this broad topic is the use of household cleaners; some of the more deadly cleaners could be used as a new herbicide, useful for controlling difficult plants. If cleaners could be used in this fashion, the market for cleaners would go up.
There is a definite positive future in this field, and with more research, we could definitely help the ecosystem, we just need to watch and wait.