Different Varieties of Plants
How many different types and varieties of plants are there?
Plants are broken down into one of five big groups (kingdoms) of living things. Plants are autotrophic eukaryotes, which means they have complex cells, make their own food and usually cannot move.
Plants include types such as trees, herbs, bushes, grasses, vines, ferns, mosses, and green algae with more than 350,000 extant species of plants identified today. Fungi and non-green algae are not classed as plants. Most plants grow in the ground, with stems above, and roots below. Water and some nutrients come from the roots. The evaporation of water from pores in the leaves pulls water through the plan called transpiration.
A plant needs sunlight, carbon dioxide, minerals and water to make food. A green substance in plants called chlorophyll traps the energy from the Sun needed to make food. Chlorophyll is mostly found in leaves, inside plastids, which are inside the leaf cells and can be thought of as a food factory. Leaves of plants vary in shape and size, but they are always the plant organ best suited to capture solar energy. Once the food is made in the leaf, it is transported to the other parts of the plant such as stems and roots