Plants are the engine of the land biosphere: they capture sunlight, split water and build the food that everything else eats. About 391,000 species are known, the overwhelming majority of them flowering plants, and new species are still described at a rate of roughly 2,000 a year.
Play the Plants quiz391,000
Known plant species
369,000
Flowering plants
~1,100
Gymnosperms
~11,000
Ferns & allies
The plant family tree
Four great groups, ordered from the simplest to the most recently evolved.
Bryophytes
Mosses, liverworts and hornworts — no roots or vascular tissue, so they stay small and damp.
~20,000
Ferns and lycophytes
Vascular plants that reproduce by spores; tree ferns formed the coal forests of 300 million years ago.
~11,000
Gymnosperms
Conifers, cycads, ginkgo and gnetophytes — seed plants with naked seeds, mostly in cones.
~1,100
Angiosperms
Flowering plants, from grasses and orchids to oaks; 94% of all plant species.
~369,000
Records from the plant kingdom
Green things hold most of the living-size records on land.
Tallest tree
Hyperion, a coast redwood in California, measured in 2006 and kept secret to protect it.
115.9 m
≈ 380.2 ft
Largest organism by mass
Pando, a quaking aspen clone in Utah, is one connected root system across 43 hectares.
~6,000 t
≈ 6,614 tons
Oldest living tree
A Great Basin bristlecone pine in California's White Mountains, alive since the Bronze Age.
~4,850 yrs
Biggest flower
Rafflesia arnoldii of Sumatra, a parasite with no leaves, stem or roots.
1 m · 11 kg
≈ 3.28 ft, 24.3 lb
Fastest growth
Some bamboo species; they can be measured growing hour by hour.
91 cm/day
≈ 35.8 in
Deepest roots
A wild fig in Echo Cave, South Africa, roots further down than a 20-storey building is tall.
~68 m
≈ 223.1 ft
What plants do for the planet
Every food chain on land begins here.
Photosynthesis
Land plants fix roughly 60 billion tonnes of carbon a year, releasing the oxygen we breathe.
Oxygen
About half of Earth's oxygen comes from ocean life, the rest from land plants — roughly one breath in two from each.
Water cycle
A single large tree can move hundreds of litres of water into the air in a day, seeding clouds downwind.
Food and medicine
Around 80% of the world's calories come from just 20 plant species, and a quarter of modern medicines derive from plants.
Did you know?
- Grasslands and forests together hold more carbon in their soils than in all the vegetation above them.
- Plants recognise the wavelength of light and grow toward it — a response first described by Charles Darwin.
- Nearly 40% of plant species are estimated to be threatened with extinction, according to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
- Some seeds stay viable for centuries: a date palm grew from a 2,000-year-old seed recovered from Masada.