Many plants produce flowers and seeds that help to propagate them. However, a few plants do not have a flower in their life cycles. Instead, they reproduce in other ways. One way is through spores that are actually tiny, dust-like, single-celled organisms that are carried away from the mature plant to begin a new plant when they come in contact with a growing medium such as soil. Mosses, liverworts, ferns and some algae use spores to reproduce.
Gymnosperms are another type of non-flowering plant. In this case, the gymnosperms form what is called "naked seeds", or seeds with a very thin coating, but they don't first form a flower. Trees with cones that open and release seeds to be carried down to soil fall into this category. Gymnosperms do not create flowers or fruit. Conifers, such as pine trees, redwoods, fir trees, cypress and cedar trees, are all this type of non-flowering plants. The redwood is the largest gymnosperm in the world.
Cyads are a different type of non-flowering plant. These are palm-like trees that have been around since the Jurassic period. They reproduce by sending out root suckers from the parent plant that then grow up from beneath the soil into a new tree. There are no flowers or seeds required because the parent plant does all of the reproductive work underground.
Ginkgo trees have a unique way of reproducing. There are male and female ginkgo trees. The male trees produce pollen spores that become wind borne and land on the seed-forming parts of the female trees. The ginkgo tree is a gymnosperm plant, so no flower is formed by the female. Rather, it just creates seeds for future trees once it is pollinated.
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