S173 Plants and People - Notes from Study Period 1

Receiving the books was a great feeling. It meant that I had started my formal journey to learn more about plants. The books are used in conjuction, with the Why Plants Need People (WPNP) being the coffee table book giving some basic science, but mainly and successfully imparting ideas in quite a light way (so far anyway). The second book is the science book (SB) that provides greater detail than WPNP and poses questions and gets you to actively study the material presented. It is this second book what we start with and follow, dipping into WPNP as and when we're told.

The module began with a swift introduction and a cool audio clip about the relationship between plants and people. As with most OU modules, there was a discussion on study methods before getting into the module proper.

We began with photosynthesis, which is similar to a previous post, so I won't go into detail here. This naturally led on to looking at different parts of plants and their names, which is what my notes are focussed on.

A Plant Cell

The feature pointed out on the course is that the chloroplasts are responsible for photosynthesis.
Water + Carbon Dioxide > Sugar + Oxygen.

Chloroplasts appear green because they absorb all colours, but green. Therefore green is reflected back. This is probably good because if they absorbed all colours of the spectrum they may overheat and die.

A Typical Plant

A plant is made up of two large parts, the root (comprising of the roots) and the shoot (comprising of everything labelled on the diagram and much more).

Leaf Cross-section
This is a cross-section of a leaf showing the depth of the leaf from the top that faces the sun, to the bottom that exchanges gases, etc. Then there is a close up of the guard cells, which open and close the stomata to allow the exchange of gases, when open.

The study period closed with a short discussion on how plants are named. I have written about the binomial system previously, here.


I think that this is a great start to the course and while I'm learning lots, it's also allowing me to consolidate the bits of information that I already knew. Roll on study period 2!

Good luck to my fellow students on this course - I hope it's going well for you.