Short answers, pulled from the story.
The first land plants emerged from the water around 470 million years ago. These early pioneers likely resembled modern liverworts and mosses and were delicate, low-lying organisms that clung to the damp edges of ancient waterways. They performed photosynthesis to capture sunlight and release oxygen as a byproduct.
Charles Darwin was baffled by the rapid diversification of flowering plants during the Cretaceous period, which occurred approximately 145 to 66 million years ago. This explosion of diversity introduced a new strategy of coevolution with animals where flowers evolved specific traits to attract pollinators. The sudden appearance of angiosperms reshaped the global flora in a geological blink of an eye.
The Norway spruce has the largest known plant genome in terms of base pairs, stretching over 19.6 billion base pairs. In contrast, the carnivorous bladderwort possesses a genome of only 82 million base pairs yet encodes a similar number of genes. The largest plant genome in terms of gene count belongs to wheat, which is predicted to encode approximately 94,000 genes.
Carnivorous plants number around 630 species and have evolved to trap and digest small animals to obtain essential nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus. The Venus flytrap is an example of these plants that survive in nutrient-poor environments by consuming small animals. These strategies demonstrate the incredible diversity of ways plants have developed to survive.
The pharmacopoeia of Dioscorides was written between 50 and 70 CE and described approximately 600 medicinal plants. It remained in use in Europe and the Middle East until around 1600 CE. Modern medicine continues to rely on plant-derived compounds with drugs like aspirin, taxol, and quinine originating from plants.
About 7,000 species of plants have been used for food, but today the majority of the world's food supply comes from just 30 species. These 30 species include cereals like rice and wheat, starchy roots like cassava and potatoes, and legumes like peas and beans. The domestication of plants began thousands of years ago with early farmers selecting and breeding plants for desirable traits.