Michael McCarthy has written this excellent defence of wild botany in the UK in the Independent. He compares the fewer than 10,000 members of Plantlife, to the love of cultivated plants with the 360,000 members of the Royal Horticultural Society, and the more than one million members of the RSPB. “In 2007/8, 18,405 students were accepted to read biology in British universities, while just 195 for botany.