What is the importance of plants in life’s framework?

It is only when we stop to think that we realize the importance of land plants to us. We eat them in our cereals and vegetables, we make use of them for fibres like cotton, we depend on them for many drugs such as penicillin. But even when we eat meat, we must remember that the animals which produce the meat probably lived on plants.

Plants are nature’s producers. From sunlight, oxygen, and other foods from the soil, plants manufacture the foods upon which all animals ultimately depend. It is worth noting that it was with the rise of land plants in the Devonian, that land animals also began to evolve.