Tree care is called arboriculture (ar-bór-i-cul-tur) from the Latin arbor which means tree and culture which means care or cultivation, since agriculture is the cultivation of food crops. Arboriculture differs from the study of trees, which is called dendrology. As with other aspects of botany, one area of interest in dendrology is decisive identification. Dendrologists learn to identify woody plants and to differentiate between species and subspecies that can present very subtle variations.
They also develop identification guides for use by both dendrologists and laymen, and they participate in the process of verifying the discovery of new species of woody plants, confirming that the discovery is original, determining who deserves recognition, and describing new species in general. I am also interested in the biology of trees, so I could be an ecologist, or more precisely a botanist, or more precisely a dendrologist, since I study trees or woody plants or practice dendrology (from the Greek dendro meaning tree).
