By Christine Niezgoda, Thomas G. Lammers, & Nancy Alaks, The Field Museum Department of Botany. Reproduced with permission from Public Garden (v.13, No.2 April 1998)

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It's no secret that plants are incredibly useful, providing people with foods, beverages, medicines, flavorings, dyes, fibers, building materials, and ornaments. It is estimated that in the industrial world, 25% of the prescription drugs, 50% of the building materials and wearing apparel, and 75% of the food consumed trace to plant origins. In agrarian societies, these percentages are even higher. The subdivision of the plant sciences devoted to studying the ways in which the human species makes use of plants is called economic botany. The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago is an international center of botanical research. In addition to an herbarium housing nearly 2.5 million pressed and dried plant specimens, the Museum's Department of Botany is home to the Timothy C. Plowman Economic Botany Collection. This collection includes over 12,000 accessions of materials that are not usually preserved as part of conventional botanical specimens, illustrating the numerous ways in which plants play a role in human affairs.
Many of the accessions represent raw plant materials: fruits, seeds, dried leaves, roots, wood, bark, fibers, oils, gums, and resins. Also included are manufactured goods--food products, pills, baskets, boxes, bowls, tools, carvings, cordage, and clothing--representing the many ways plant materials have been fashioned into functional and decorative items by both industrialized and agrarian societies.
Above: Fibers and cordage in the economic botany collection.
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