There are hundreds of thousands of plant species on the planet, including trees.
The plant kingdom is a rich and varied world, with species like green algae that grow at a microscopic level and monstrously large and imposing beauties like giant sequoias. Botanists, who study plant species, have identified more than 300,000 species of plants that exist today. Extant species can be divided into a few groups, including bryophytes, ferns, fern allies, and seed plants.
Mosses, in the division Bryophyta, are small, soft, nonvascular plants.
As with the species of the animal kingdom, the species that currently exist in the realm of the plane represent only a fraction of those that have existed on planet Earth. Archaeologists and geologists regularly discover fossils attesting to the fact that there were plants on this planet that no longer grow anywhere known to humans.
Bryophytes are a group containing plant species that do not flower and do not produce seeds. These types of plants reproduce through spores. A common type of bryophyte is the moss.
Seed plants, also called “spermatophytes”, reproduce by producing seeds. Flowering plants and coniferous trees are examples of these types of plants. Many fruits and vegetables are also part of the seed plant variety.
A coniferous tree is an evergreen tree whose seeds are harvested from the cones the tree produces.
Ferns, like bryophytes, reproduce through spores. What differentiates this type from bryophytes is that the plants it contains have a vascular structure, which means that they have a xylem and a phloem. There are about 12,000 species within the fern group. The term “ferns” refers to a group of plants that also reproduce through spores and have vascular systems, but are not true ferns.
The first non-vascular plants would have resembled modern lichens.
A brief sketch can in no way capture the breadth and variety of the many mosses, ferns, flowers, trees, lichens, shrubs, algae, and grasses currently living on planet Earth. This topic has been of great fascination for scientists of various persuasions for thousands of years. One of the best places, beyond the world beyond your front door, to get a sense of the planet’s many plant species is a natural history museum. Another very interesting and beautiful resource for plant information is a book called Das Naturalienkabinet or Cabinet of Natural Curiosities, which is a collection of commissioned color illustrated plates by a man named Albertus Seba.