Non-vascular Plant

Non-vascular Plant

Non-vascular plants is a general term for those plants without a vascular system (xylem and phloem). Although non-vascular plants lack these particular tissues, a number of non-vascular plants possess tissues specialized for internal transport of water.

Non-vascular plants do not have a wide variety of specialized tissue. Liverworts have structures that look like leaves, but they are not true leaves because they have no xylem or phloem. Likewise, mosses and algae have no such tissues.

All land plants have a life cycle with an alternation of generations between a diploid sporophyte and a haploid gametophyte, but in all nonvascular land plants the gametophyte generation is dominant. In these plants, the sporophytes grow from and are dependent on gametophytes for taking in water and mineral nutrients and for provision of photosynthate, the products of photosynthesis.