Chapter 3. The Plant Body

Multicellular land plants are built into distinct modules, and can be broadly divided into leaf, stem, roots, and flowers. The flowers represent the reproductive stage of the plant life cycle, whereas the other three represent the vegetative stage. It is in the flowers where seeds are formed upon fertilization and the plant life cycle can continue. However, there are plants like mosses and ferns that do not form seeds. They do not form flowers upon maturity and produce spores instead. In the following sections, we will explore different parts of the plant body by taking examples from plants like thale cress, rice, wheat, and moss Physcomitrella.