Every wonder what the difference is between a flower garden, a vegetable garden, and a botanical garden? We see the word everywhere, on hair care products and creations of that nature, but what does it really mean? A flower garden is quite obviously a garden that one plants a variety of flowers in and a vegetable garden is quite obviously a garden the vegetables are cultivated. A botanical garden is a garden that is more or less planted and documented and cultivated for scientific purposes. That definition seems a little broad, so let's look a little further.

A garden that is used in a display to educate is a botanical garden. That means whether it contains herbs, vegetables, flowers, or even weeds, if it is on display to teach something about nature, flora, fauna, or cultivation, then it is considered a botanical garden.

A garden that is planted to provide research materials on plants, their growing patterns, their possible uses, or their natural habitat is also considered a botanical garden. Originally, botanical gardens were created for university studies and educating the future botanists of the world. Over time, however botanical gardens were created by companies to learn more about the natural ingredients that were sought in the products they were creating, museums to encourage public awareness and education, individual botanists to discover how to introduce new plants into the market place, either for gardening or for health purposes, and every day gardeners for the purposes of creating new plants, or learning how grow plants that are foreign to the region.

Botanical gardens have been set up to all over the world in an effort to alleviate distressed plant populations or even to attempt to bring back extinct plant species. Botanical gardens play a much larger role in our society than we realize. Botanical gardens are essential in the creation of medicines, herbal supplements and even lotions.

A botanical garden can also consist of plants that are used in products such as hair care products, or anything else that uses plant extracts. These botanical gardens are sufficiently large, and typically the extracts are not taken directly from the botanical garden, but the botanist for the company can learn how to get more plant per planting and cultivate more extract from one single botanical garden. There has been a recent increase in botanical gardens and botanical increase as society slowly returns toward natural solutions.