Ch 6Anatomy of Flowering Plants — Class 11 Biology, concept-first.

Plant anatomy is the study of the internal structure of a plant's organs -- what tissues each organ is built from, how those tissues are arranged, and how that arrangement suits the organ's function.

Once a cell produced by a meristem stops dividing and instead takes up a fixed shape, size, wall thickness and function, it is said to have differentiated into a permanent tissue.

Rather than tracking every individual tissue separately, plant anatomists group the tissues of a mature organ into three tissue systems, based on the position each occupies and the broad job it perfor…

The internal (transverse-section) structure of a root reflects its two chief jobs: absorbing water and minerals from the soil, and anchoring the plant firmly in place.

A stem's transverse section, like a root's, is organised outward-in, but its layers differ from a root's in composition and, in a dicot stem, in how the vascular bundles are arranged.

A leaf is built, from top to bottom, of an upper epidermis, a middle layer of photosynthetic ground tissue called the mesophyll (through which the vascular bundles, or veins, run), and a lower epiderm…

A typical monocot stem, as the previous sections have described, is essentially fixed in width once its primary structure is complete, because it has no vascular cambium.

Comparing the root, the stem and the leaf side by side across a dicot and a monocot plant reveals that their many anatomical differences are not a random list of unrelated facts -- almost all of them…

This chapter traced a flowering plant's internal structure from its dividing meristems through to its fully differentiated organs, and compared that structure between dicots and monocots at every leve…