Ferns Have Spores

Today we learned about Pterophyta phylum. Pterophyta means winged plant. Think of a pterodactyl which is a dinosaur with wings. These plants have leaves which look like wings or feathers. These are different from other plants we've studied because they have spores instead of seeds.

Spores have a baby plant in a container but they are different from a seed because they don't have any food for the baby plant. That makes them very small, much smaller than a seed. I learned that a seed is a container with food AND a baby plant inside of it.

You find spores under the leaves of ferns. Leaves on ferns are called fronds.

There aren't any ferns around our house but we went to a close-by plant store called a nursery to see ferns. Here are some photos we took of our visit:


Ferns grow in a circle like this one.























Here you can see the spores under the leaves around the edges.

Uncovered Seeds

Uncovered seeds are called gymnosperms. There are four groups of gymnosperms but coniferphytas have the most. Coniferphyta means cone bearer plants.I learned that pine trees have uncovered seeds and they are gymnosperms.

We have five big pine trees close to our house. They are green even in the winter because they are evergreens. When we walked to the trees, we picked up pine cones by the trees. They were old ones which we could tell by looking at them closely. They were brown and rotting. We saw some little new cones on the trees on the tips of the branches.



You can see tiny pine cones on the tips of the branches if you look closely.






Here are Philip and Peter standing by a Christmas tree someone planted years ago.


There were plenty of cones still up in this tree.