The plant

What is a plant?

To answer this question, it is best if take a look at a plant in relation to all living things. There are 6 kingdoms used to organize life and they are Plants, Animals, Protists, Fungi, Archaebacteria, and Eubacteria. Plants are living multicellular organisms of Plantae and comprising land plants and green algae. The kingdom of plantae has over 350,000 species and second in size to Arthropoda (Arthropods). Plants have chlorophyll giving them the ability to carry out photosynthesis.

How are plants classified?

What distinguishes kingdom plantae from all the other kingdoms, is that the cells of kingdom plantae have cell walls made of cellulose that are used to support the plant. This cell wall is not a semi-permeable membrane and the cell cannot transport material and nutrients in and out of the cell walls. For this function there is the large central vacuole that stores water and chemicals for use inside of the cell. Another characteristic belonging only to kingdom plantae is their chloroplasts, the organelle that converts light energy into chemical energy inside the plant where the energy is stored as sugar. Their ability to convert inorganic matter (atmospheric CO2) to organic matter using photosynthesis keeps us humans in kingdom animalia alive.

Plants that we are mostly familiar with are in the subkingdom, Embryophyta. These include hornworts, liverworts, mosses, ferns, and flowering plants. Delving deeper, the divisions in this category are in vascular or non-vascular land plants. Within vascular the division is seed plants. Extant seed plants are divided into five groups.

In the most diverse group of land plants, (name plants) cannabis belongs to the Angiosperm. All the plants in this division have the same characteristics including flowers, endosperm with seeds, and the production of fruits that contain seeds. Fossils of flowering plants have been discovered that are over 130 million years old. The flowering plants are important in many ways above and beyond their aesthetic appeal in flower arrangements. Magnoliophyta contains 2 classes, Lilopsida and Magnoliopsida or Dicots.

Annuals, biennials, vines, epiphytes, aquatics, parasites, and saprotrophs are also well represented in dicots. Trees, Shrubs and Vines, Forbs/Herbs, Grasses (Graminoids) and Ferns. Vascular bundles of the stem are usually borne in a ring that encloses the pith. Vessel elements present except in some putatively primitive woody or aquatic families. Most dicots have a primary root system derived from the radicle, although some have an adventitious root system commonly seen in the class of monocots. Cotyledons are usually 2, seldom 1, 3, or 4. Leaves are mostly net-veined.

Cannabaceae is a small family of flowering plants. As now circumscribed, the family includes about 170 species grouped in about 11 genera, including Cannabis (hemp), Humulus (hops) and Celtis (hackberries). Celtis is by far the largest genus, containing about 100 species.[1]

Other than their a shared evolutionary origin (see Phylogeny below), members of the family have few common characteristics; some are trees (e.g. Celtis), others are herbaceous plants (e.g. Cannabis).

Members of this family can be trees (e.g. Celtis), erect herbs (e.g. Cannabis), or twining herbs (e.g. Humulus).

Leaves are often more or less palmately lobed or palmately compound and always bear stipules. Cystoliths are always present and some members of this family possess laticifers.

Cannabaceae are often dioecious (distinct male and female plants). The flowers are actinomorphic (radially symmetrical) and not showy, as these plants are pollinated by the wind. As an adaptation to this kind of pollination, the calyx is short and there is no corolla. Flowers are grouped to form cymes. In the dioecious plants the masculine inflorescences are long and look like panicles, while the feminine are shorter and bear less flowers. The pistil is made of two connate carpels, the usually superior ovary is unilocular; there is no fixed number of stamens.

The fruit can be an achene, drupe or a small nut.