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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 that are much closer...

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, branch or leaf attached...

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 are able to divide...

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 a lot of things...

Plants must find a way to move energy and water around in order to survive, and the most sophisticated way plants do this on Earth is by using specialty cells to form a “vascular system”. Plant cells form veins that are extremely efficient at sending supplies up to the incredible heights that plants can manage to reach and back down again, hardening to also...

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...