Definition of "botanize" [bot•a•nize]

• To collect plants for scientific study. (verb-intransitive)
• To investigate or study plants scientifically. (verb-intransitive)
• To investigate or explore the plant life of (a region). (verb-transitive)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "As a young professor in Uppsala, Linnaeus led his students on plant-collecting hikes, scattering them into the fields to botanize and summoning them to lunch with a trumpet."
• "George Crabbe used to go there and botanize, and lick the wounds inflicted by the scornful, bullying fishermen of Aldeburgh, who, having known him as a boy, scrubbing out barrels in the town, despised him, first as a doctor and later as their curate."
• "About the same time, Mr. Sparrman, who had imprudently gone out alone to botanize, was assaulted by two men, who stripped him of every thing which he had about him, excepting his trowsers, and struck him again and again with his own hanger, though happily without doing him any harm."