The science and art of growing, producing, marketing, and utilizing high-value, intensively grown food, and ornamental plants in a sustainable manner is known as Horticulture.Annual and perennial plants, fruits and vegetables, decorative indoor plants, and landscape plants are all examples of horticulture crops.

Horticulture farming also aims to enhance the quality of life, as well as the beauty, sustainability, and recovery of our ecosystem and the human condition.
Horticulture is divided into the cultivation of plants for food (pomology and olericulture) and plants for ornament (floriculture and landscape horticulture). Pomology deals with fruit and nut crops. Olericulture deals with herbaceous plants for the kitchen, including, for example, carrots (edible root), asparagus (edible stem), lettuce (edible leaf), cauliflower (edible flower buds), tomatoes (edible fruit), and peas (edible seed). Floriculture deals with the production of flowers and ornamental plants; generally, cut flowers, pot plants, and greenery. Landscape horticulture is a broad category that includes plants for the landscape, including lawn turf but particularly nursery crops such as shrubs, trees, and vines.

Temperate zones for horticulture cannot be defined exactly by lines of latitude or longitude but are usually regarded as including those areas where frost in winter occurs, even though rarely. Thus, most parts of Europe, North America, and northern Asia are included, though some parts of the United States, such as southern Florida, are considered subtropical. A few parts of the north coast of the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean islands are also subtropical. In the Southern Hemisphere, practically all of New Zealand, a few parts of Australia, and the southern part of South America have temperate climates. For horticultural purposes altitude is also a factor; the lower slopes of great mountain ranges, such as the Himalayas and the Andes, are included. Thus, the temperate zones are very wide and the range of plants that can be grown in them is enormous, probably greater than in either the subtropical or tropical zones. In the temperate zones are the great coniferous and deciduous forests: pine, spruce, fir, most of the cypresses, the deciduous oaks (but excluding many of the evergreen ones), ash, birch, and linden.

There is no sharp line of demarcation between the tropics and the subtropics. Just as many tropical plants can be cultivated in the subtropics, so also many subtropical and even temperate plants can be grown satisfactorily in the tropics. Elevation is a determining factor. For example, the scarlet runner bean, a common plant in temperate regions, grows, flowers, and develops pods normally on the high slopes of Mount Meru in Africa near the Equator, but it will not set pods in Hong Kong, a subtropical situation a little south of the Tropic of Cancer but at a low elevation.In addition to elevation, another determinant is the annual distribution of rainfall. Plants that grow and flower in the monsoon areas, as in India, will not succeed where the climate is uniformly wet, as in Bougainville in the Solomon Islands. Another factor is the length of day, the number of hours the Sun is above the horizon; some plants flower only if the day is long, but others make their growth during the long days and flower when the day is short. Certain strains of the cosmos plant are so sensitive to light that where the day is always about 12 hours, as near the Equator, they flower when only a few inches high; if grown near the Tropic of Cancer or the Tropic of Capricorn, they attain a height of several feet, if the seeds are sown in the spring, before flowering in the short days of autumn and winter. Poinsettia is a short-day plant that may be seen in flower in Singapore on any day of the year, while in Trinidad it is a blaze of glory only in late December.

The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature.

To nurture a garden is to feed not just on the body, but the soul.