Plant anatomy left the garden surface for the microscope
Plant anatomy—phytotomy—now means internal structure, especially cells and tissues, split from morphology’s outer form since mid-twentieth-century habit. Theophrastus sketched morphology around 300 BCE; modern internal study crystalized when Malpighi and Grew published in the late 1600s.
Plant anatomy, also called phytotomy, is the study of what lies inside a plant. It once took in morphology too, the description of outer shape, but since the mid-twentieth century the two have been treated as separate fields. Today the work is often done at the level of individual cells, by slicing tissue thin and examining it under a microscope.
Researchers organise the subject in two ways. A systems approach follows what the plant does: moving nutrients, flowering, pollination, forming embryos and developing seeds. The classical approach divides it by structure. Flower anatomy covers the calyx, corolla and reproductive whorls; leaf anatomy the epidermis, stomata and palisade cells; stem anatomy the vascular tissues, buds and shoot tip; wood anatomy the bark, cork, xylem, phloem, cambium, heartwood and sapwood; and root anatomy the tip and endodermis.
The history runs back to Theophrastus, who around 300 BC wrote several plant treatises, of which only Enquiry into Plants and On the Causes of Plants survive; his ideas on form and classification did not hold up to Renaissance scrutiny. In 1596 the Swiss physician Gaspard Bauhin published Pinax theatri botanici, the first work to name species with two-part names, grouping plants by affinities that were often structural.
The discipline became a modern science in the late 1600s through two founders. The Italian microscopist Marcello Malpighi issued Anatomia Plantarum in 1671, and the English doctor Nehemiah Grew followed in 1672; Grew recognised plant cells, though he called them vesicles and bladders. Carl Linnaeus built taxonomy on structure and published Species Plantarum in 1753. Charles-Francois Brisseau de Mirbel launched plant cytology with his treatise of 1802, Johann Moldenhawer described microscopic tissues in 1812, and in 1813 Augustin Pyrame de Candolle argued that anatomy, not physiology, should be the only basis for classifying plants.
Source: Plant anatomy
