Textbook of Plant Chemistry

Plants are a major group of living things (about 300000 species)including familiar organisms such as trees flowers herbs and ferns.Aristotle divided all living things between plants which generally donot move or have sensory organs and animals. In Linnaeus’ systemthese became the Kingdoms Vegetabilia (later Plantae) and Animalia.Since then it has become clear that the Plantae as originally definedincluded several unrelated groups and the fungi and several groups ofalgae were removed to new kingdoms. However these are still oftenconsidered plants in many contexts. Indeed any attempt to match“plant” with a single taxon is doomed to fail because plant is a vaguelydefined concept unrelated to the presumed phylogenic concepts onwhich modern taxonomy is based.