The Tissue System

The previous chapter classified plant tissues by the type of cell that makes each one up — meristematic tissue and the various permanent tissues. Tissues can equally be classified by a second criterion: where they are located within the plant body. A tissue's structure, and the function it performs, is closely tied to this location — the same broad tissue types are arranged differently, and take on somewhat different forms, depending on whether they sit at the surface of an organ, fill its bulk, or run along its conducting strands.

On this basis of structure and location, the tissues of a flowering plant fall into three tissue systems, each running more or less continuously through the whole plant body:

• the epidermal tissue system, the outermost protective covering of the plant;
• the ground (or fundamental) tissue system, which forms the bulk of the plant body lying between the epidermis and the vascular tissue; and …