Biology

The Four Main Groups of Plants

A long, long time ago, a sea-algae, probably from the division called Charophyta, produced a new idea among the plant kingdom and crawled out of the sea to establish the lineage of land plants we know on Earth today.

There are a wide variety of weird and wonderful land-dwelling plants out there today that have all evolved from this pioneering organism, but we can break them up into 4 groups:

1. Bryophytes are considered the simplest of the four types, because they lack a full vascular system, true roots and true leaves. These include mosses and other small plants that grow in wet areas and use spores to reproduce.

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Monocots vs. Dicots, With Diagrams

Flowering plants, also known as angiosperms, can be broken into two groups: monocotyledons (monocots) and dicotyledons (dicots). You’ve probably heard these terms being discussed by gardeners, and if you don’t know the difference it can be intimidating to ask. Grasses, onion, monster and palm trees are all examples of monocots and if you look closely you will start to see

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What Are Plant Buds?

Plants aren’t always able to grow new shoots wherever they please. There usually needs to be an existing shoot, whether exposed in the axil of a leaf or hidden beneath their bark. Buds contain meristematic tissue that is necessary to grow new plant cells. A bud is a condensed shoot with tiny leaves and branch material including nodes and internodes

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Nodes And Internodes

Go outside, pluck a runner of grass from your back yard and take a close look at it. You will see that it is made of a system of connected “nodes” and “internodes”: the swollen linking points are called the nodes, and the skinny part connecting one node to another is called an internode. Usually if there is a bud,

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Meristematic Tissue: How A Plant Grows Larger

Meristematic tissue isn’t a term that’s usually thrown around by gardeners, however all plants do have this type of tissue and understanding its function helps us understand plants a little bit better. Plants create new tissue through “meristematic” cells that are similar to stem cells found in animals. The “meristem” of a plant is made of undifferentiated (meristematic) cells that

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