Berlin Botanic Garden

               The garden is located in the Dahlem neighborhood of the borough of Steglitz-Zehlendorf. It was constructed between 1897 and 1910, under the guidance of architect Adolf Engler, in order to present exotic plants returned from German colonies. The complex consists of several buildings and glass-houses, such as the Cactus Pavilion and the Pavilion Victoria (which features a collection of orchids, carnivorous plants and giant white water lily Victoria-Seerosen). The total area of all glass-houses is 6,000 m². The garden's open-air areas, sorted by geographical origin, have a total area of 13 hectares. The garden's arboretum is 14 hectares.
The best-known part of the garden is the Great Pavilion (Das Große Tropenhaus. The temperature inside is maintained at 30 °C and air humidity is kept high. Among the many tropical plants it hosts a giant bamboo.

   
Botanischer Garten.                         Cactus Pavilion. 

Pavilion Victoria.

Giant bamboo in Great Pavilion.

Botanical Garden

              A botanical garden (or botanic garden) is a well-tended area displaying a wide range of plants labelled with their botanical names. It may contain specialist plant collections such as cacti and succulent plants, herb gardens, plants from particular parts of the world, and so on; there may be greenhouses, shadehouses, again with special collections such as tropical plants, alpine plants, or other exotic plants. Visitor services at a botanical garden might include tours, educational displays, art exhibitions, book rooms, open-air theatrical and musical performances, and other entertainment.
Botanical gardens are often run by universities or other scientific research organizations, and often have associated herbaria and research programmes in plant taxonomy or some other aspect of botanical science. In principle, their role is to maintain documented collections of living plants for the purposes of scientific research, conservation, display, and education, although this will depend on the resources available and the special interests pursued at each particular garden.
   A botanical garden is a controlled and staffed institution for the maintenance of a living collection of plants under scientific management for purposes of education and research, together with such libraries, herbaria, laboratories, and museums as are essential to its particular undertakings. Each botanical garden naturally develops its own special fields of interests depending on its personnel, location, extent, available funds, and the terms of its charter. It may include greenhouses, test grounds, an herbarium, an arboretum, and other departments. It maintains a scientific as well as a plant-growing staff, and publication is one of its major modes of expression.

Historical Development
                The history of botanical gardens is closely linked to the history of botany itself. The botanical gardens of the 16th and 17th centuries were medicinal gardens, but the idea of a botanical garden changed to encompass displays of the beautiful, strange, new and sometimes economically important plant trophies being returned from the European colonies and other distant lands. Later, in the 18th century, they became more educational in function, demonstrating the latest plant classification systems devised by botanists working in the associated herbaria as they tried to order these new treasures. Then, in the 19th and 20th centuries, the trend was towards a combination of specialist and eclectic collections demonstrating many aspects of both horticulture and botany.

  Grand Garden of Ancient History
Early medieval gardens in Islamic Spain resembled botanic gardens of the future, an example being the 11th-century Huerta del Ray garden of physician and author Ibn Wafid (999–1075 CE) in Toledo. This was later taken over by garden chronicler Ibn Bassal (fl. 1085 CE) until the Christian conquest in 1085 CE. Ibn Bassal then founded a garden in Seville, most of its plants being collected on a botanical expedition that included Morocco, Persia, Sicily, and Egypt. The medical school of Montpelier was also founded by Spanish Arab physicians, and by 1250 CE, it included a physic garden, but the site was not given botanic garden status until 1593.

  A 16th-century print of the Botanical Garden of Padua—the oldest academic botanic garden still at its original location

Archaebacteria Eubacteria Kingdom

              In the past Archaea had been classed with bacteria as prokaryotes (or Kingdom Monera) and named archaebacteria, but this classification is regarded as outdated. In fact, the Archaea have an independent evolutionary history and show many differences in their biochemistry from other forms of life, and so they are now classified as a separate
domain in the three-domain system. In this system, the phylogenetically distinct branches of evolutionary descent are the Archaea, Bacteria and Eukaryota. So far, the Archaea have been further divided into four recognized phyla; more phyla may be established in the course of future research. Of these groups, the Crenarchaeota and the Euryarchaeota are the most intensively studied. Classification is still difficult, because the vast majority have never been studied in the laboratory and have only been detected by analysis of their nucleic acids in samples from the environment.

Halobacteria sp. strain NRC-1,
each cell about 5 μm long  

New Domain
 Archaea were first classified as a separate group of prokaryotes in 1977 by Carl Woese and George E. Fox in phylogenetic trees based on the sequences of ribosomal RNA (rRNA) genes. These two groups were originally named the Archaebacteria and Eubacteria and treated as kingdoms or subkingdoms, which Woese and Fox termed Urkingdoms. Woese argued that this group of prokaryotes is a fundamentally different sort of life. To emphasize this difference, these two domains were later renamed Archaea and Bacteria. The word archaea comes from the Ancient Greek ἀρχαῖα, meaning "ancient things".

  Archaea were first found in extreme environments, such as volcanic hot springs. Pictured here is Grand Prismatic Spring of Yellowstone National Park.

Species

Biology defines a species as a group of related organisms. The familiar exclusive breeding criterion (organisms that can breed with each other but not with others) is of no help because archaea reproduce asexually.
Archaea show high levels of horizontal gene transfer between lineages. Some researchers suggest that individuals can be grouped into species-like populations given highly similar genomes and infrequent gene transfer to/from cells with less-related genomes, as in the genus Ferroplasma On the other hand, studies in Halorubrum found significant genetic transfer to/from less-related populations, limiting the criterion's applicability. A second concern is to what extent such species designations have practical meaning.

The ARMAN are a new group of archaea recently discovered in acid mine drainage

Plantae Kingdom

                Plants, also called green plants (Viridiplantae in Latin), are living multicellular organisms of the kingdom Plantae. They form a clade that includes the flowering plants, conifers and other gymnosperms, ferns, clubmosses, hornworts, liverworts and mosses, as well as, depending on definition, the green algae. Plants exclude the red and brown seaweeds such as kelp, the fungi and bacteria.
                  Green plants have cell walls with cellulose and characteristically obtain most of their energy from sunlight via photosynthesis using chlorophyll contained in chloroplasts, which gives them their green color. Some plants are parasitic and have lost the ability to produce normal amounts of chlorophyll or to photosynthesize. Plants are also characterized by sexual reproduction, modular and indeterminate growth, and an alternation of generations, although asexual reproduction is common, and some plants bloom only once while others bear only one bloom.

Algae
               Algae comprise several different groups of organisms which produce energy through photosynthesis and for that reason have been included in the plant kingdom in the past. Most conspicuous among the algae are the seaweeds, multicellular algae that may roughly resemble land plants, but are classified among the brown, red and green algae. Each of these algal groups also includes various microscopic and single-celled organisms. There is good evidence that some of these algal groups arose independently from separate non-photosynthetic ancestors, with the result that many groups of algae are no longer classified within the plant kingdo.
    Green algae from Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur, 1904. 

Fungi
                 The classification of fungi has been controversial until quite recently in the history of biology. Linnaeus' original classification placed the fungi within the Plantae, since they were unquestionably not animals or minerals and these were the only other alternatives. With later developments in microbiology, in the 19th century Ernst Haeckel felt that another kingdom was required to classify newly discovered micro-organisms. The introduction of the new kingdom Protista in addition to Plantae and Animalia, led to uncertainty as to whether fungi truly were best placed in the Plantae or whether they ought to be reclassified as protists. Haeckel himself found it difficult to decide and it was not until 1969 that a solution was found whereby Robert Whittaker proposed the creation of the kingdom Fungi. Molecular evidence has since shown that the last common ancestor (concestor) of the Fungi was probably more similar to that of the Animalia than of any other kingdom, including the Plantae.

  The evolution of plants has resulted in increasing levels of complexity, from the earliest algal mats, through bryophytes, lycopods, ferns to the complex gymnosperms and angiosperms of today. The groups which appeared earlier continue to thrive, especially in the environments in which they evolved.

Classification of Plants

                 Plant classification is the placing of known plants into groups or categories to show some relationship. Scientific classification follows a system of rules that standardizes the results, and groups successive categories into a hierarchy.

• Kingdom: Plantae
• Division: Magnoliophyt 
• Class: Liliopsida
• Order: Liliales
• Family: Liliaceae
• Genus: ......
• Species

Plant Taxonomy

                 Plant taxonomy is the science that finds, identifies, describes, classifies, and names plants. Thus making it one of the main branches of taxonomy(the science that finds, describes, classifies, and names living things).
Plant taxonomy is closely allied to plant systematics, and there is no sharp boundary between the two. In practice, "Plant systematics" involves relationships between plants and their evolution, especially at the higher levels, whereas "plant taxonomy" deals with the actual handling of plant specimens. The precise relationship between taxonomy and systematics, however, has changed along with the goals and methods employed.
Plant taxonomy is well known for being turbulent, and traditionally not having any close agreement on circumscription and placement of taxa. See the list of systems of plant taxonomy.

Beech Trees part of SONIAN FOREST

  Even, dense old-growth stand of beech trees (Fagus sylvatica) prepared to be regenerated by their saplings in the understory, in the Brussels part of the Sonian Forest.
The Sonian Forest (Dutch: Zoniënwoud, French: Forêt de Soignes) is a 4,421-hectare (10,920-acre) forest that lies across the south-eastern part of Brussels, Belgium.
The forest lies in the Flemish municipalities of Sint-Genesius-Rode, Hoeilaart, Overijse and Tervuren, in Uccle, Watermael-Boitsfort, Auderghem and Woluwe-Saint-Pierre in the Brussels-Capital Region and in the Walloon towns of La Hulpe and Waterloo. Thus it stretches out over the three Belgian Regions. It is maintained by Flanders (56%), the Brussels-Capital Region (38%) and Wallonia (6%). There are some contiguous tracts of privately held forest and the Kapucijnenbos, the "Capuchin Wood", which belongs to the Royal Trust.

 
Winter sunset in the Sonian Forest 
History:
               The forest is part of the scattered remains of the ancient Silva Carbonaria or Charcoal Forest. The first mention of the Sonian Forest (Soniaca Silva) dates from the early Middle Ages. Then the forest south of Brussels was crossed by the river Zenne/Senne and extended as far as Hainaut, covering most of the high ground between the Zenne and the Dijle. The ninth-century vita of Saint Foillan mentions "the forest, next to the abbey of Saint Gertrude, called the Sonesian" In the sixteenth century it was still seven leagues in circumference. At the start of the 19th century the area of the wood was still about 100 square kilometres, but due to wood cutting its area diminished to its current area of 44.21 km².

Today the forest consists mainly of European beeches and oaks. Several trees are more than 200 years old. Formerly the forest held the Abbey of Saint Foillan not far from Nivelles. The forest served for a long period as an exclusive hunting ground for the nobility, but today is open to the general public.
The forest contains a somewhat reduced fauna and flora. Due to human influence and impoverishment of the ecosystem various plants and animals have become extinct. The forest was home to 46 different mammal species. Of these seven have disappeared altogether: the brown bear (around 1000), the wolf (around 1810), the hazel dormouse (around 1842), the Red Deer, the badger and the hare. The boar was thought to have been extinct since 1957 but in 2007 new specimens were discovered roaming the wood. According to the Flemish Agency for Nature and Forest (ANB) this is unlikely to be a natural spread but probably two to four animals which most likely were either released or escaped from captivity.
The many species of bat in the forest led to it being classified as a Natura 2000 protected site.

  Small chapel in the Sonian Forest near the site of the monastery of John of Ruysbroeck at Groenendaal.

Amongst the contemplative monks and nuns who lived and prayed in the forest, the most notable was John of Ruysbroeck who established a Monastery near Groenendaal at Vauvert. At this time the forest also held a house of Cistercian nuns at Pennebeek (founded 1201 on land given by Henry I, Duke of Brabant to Sister Gisle); a convent of Benedictine nuns at Forest (founded in 1107 by Gilbert de Gand) and a cloister of Dominican sisters at Val Duchesne (founded 1262 the Duchess Aleyde).

Forest in different areas of the world (SPINY FOREST)

  Spiny forest at Ifaty, Madagascar, featuring various Adansonia (baobab) species, Alluaudia procera (Madagascar ocotillo) and other vegetation

 

The grassy plains that dominate the western landscape are dotted with stony massifs (left), patches of deciduous forest, and baobab trees (center), while the south is characterized by desert and spiny forests.

         

Tavy (slash-and-burn) destruction of native forest habitat is widespread (left), causing massive erosion (center) and silting of rivers (right).