List Of Seedless Vascular Plants

There are four divisions of plants that make up the class of seedless, vascular plants. Those plant divisions are Psilophyta, Lycophyta, Sphenophyta and the Pterophyta, according to the Horticulture and Crop department at Ohio State University. Vascular plants have systems of tubes used to transport water through the plants. This group of vascular plants does not reproduce with seeds; instead, they reproduce with spores.

Club mosses, often called creeping cedar or ground pine, are small creeping plants that are found in the tropical mountain areas. They are a perennial evergreen plant with forked branches and scale-like leaves. Club mosses reproduce with spores that develop on their modified leaves. This group of vascular plants was very populous during the carboniferous period, or the period in time that contributed to most of the coal deposits, about 360 million to 299 million years ago, according to the Horticulture and Crop Science department at Ohio State University. They once grew to the size of trees, but are now low-lying plants.

Psilotum is also known as the whisk fern. These plants lack leaves and roots, which make them the simplest of vascular plants. The whisk fern is mostly found in tropical and subtropical regions of Asia and the Pacific, where they grow in cracks and crevices in the sandy soils near beaches. They are native to swamplands and prefer rich, moist soil, but can tolerate a certain degree of drought.

Horsetails are often referred to as living fossils because the plant has changed little for an estimated 100 million years. The mature plants resemble horse tails. This group of plants is also called scouring rushes and candock. The stems of the horsetail plants contain abrasives and are often dried and used in Japan to finish woodcrafts. They offer a smoother final surface than sandpaper.

There are approximately 20,000 different species of ferns. It is the most common of all seedless, vascular plants. Ferns prefer moist, shady, woodland areas, but they are adaptable to a wide variety of environments including remote mountains, rocky cliffs, and tropical forest beds, and they can be found next to bodies of water or in open fields. The leaves of the fern are called fronds and grow by unrolling to form large leaves. Some ferns are used as food, such as the fiddlehead, but most ferns in the United States are used as landscape plants. Native Americans reportedly used ferns to make bandages and would rub the fronds of the fern on an open cut, according to the Arkansas State Park system. Ferns have antiseptic properties that can prevent small cuts from becoming infected.