Vascular plants, also known as tracheophytes, are plants found on land that have lignified tissues for conducting water and minerals throughout the body of the plant.
1. These lignified tissues are also called vascular tissue and consist of water-conducting xylem tissue and food-conducting phloem tissue.
2. Vascular tissue forms a central column, also called stele, through the plant axis for the transport of different substances.
3. Vascular plants are said to have a true stem, leaves, and roots due to the presence of vascular tissues.
4. The root is a true root that enables the plant to anchor onto the soil and gets nutrients from it.
5. The leaves are broad and have stomata that work for gas exchange and support transpiration.
6. The stem of vascular plants is multilayered with vascular tissue that helps in the protection and conduction of food and water.
7. The arrangement of these issues might be different in a different group of plants as it depends on the pattern of division of cells.
8. The xylem is composed of non-living matter, tracheids, and vesicles, hardened by lignin that provides a stiff structure to the tissue. 9. The phloem, on the other hand, contains living sieve elements that are not lignified.
10. Vascular plants are capable of surviving on land due to their ability to transport food, water, and mineral to different parts of the plant by creating pressure through the tissues.
11. Besides, they also have several modifications that facilitate their survival on land.
12. Another essential characteristic of vascular plants is that the principal generation phase in these plants is the sporophytic phase where they produce diploid spores.
13. Vascular plants are tall and large in size compared to the non-vascular plants because of their ability to transport necessary substances to all parts of the body via vascular tissue.
14. It is believed that vascular plants are a more evolved version of non-vascular plants and thus came later in the evolutionary history.
15. Vascular plants are divided into two groups; non-seed plants or lower vascular plants or cryptograms and seed plants or higher vascular plants or phanerogams.
16. The lower vascular plants include plants like ferns that although are adapted to survive on land still have some characteristics of their aquatic ancestry. These plants belong to the group Pteridophyta.
17. The higher vascular plants are numerous and extremely diverse and are further divided into different subgroups.
18.Some examples of vascular plants include maize, mustard, rose, cycad, ferns, clubmosses, grasses, etc.
