March 08, 2026 | Source: Chelsea Green Publishing

Seed Crop Characteristics

There are a number of prominent characteristics of cultivated plants that are quite similar within the nine plant families in which most of our vegetable crops are found.

One of the first things someone researching our cultivated crop plants finds is that closely related crops within a particular family usually share a number of prominent features.

We know that different crops within the same family often share certain phenotypic traits, such as structural or reproductive characteristics.

Flower Structure

Flower structure has long been a principal way of categorizing plants into families.

The type and structure of the fruit, which is indeed a fertilized ovary of the flower, has also classically been used to assign different plants of the angiosperms (the true flowering plants) to various species and genera.

As to structural features, we all know that crop species in the same family usually share a common leaf type, arrangement of their leaves on the main stem, type of stem, and so forth.