The book presents in an accessible form how the knowledge of the shapes of the plant body contributed and contributes to the understanding of plant life strategies. It attempts to answer the questions: what are the ecological functions of plant traits such as height, shoot cyclicity or adventitious branching from roots in the daily life of a plant and/or how is the ecological function of a plant affected by its morphology and architecture. The book is the first attempt to bring together traditional botanical knowledge about plant morphology and architecture with contemporary functional ecology. In addition to the plants themselves, it also deals with those who contributed to the knowledge of the ecological function of plant forms and brings their brief medallions. The book is intended for all those who like plants, students and professional botanists.

Prof. Dr. Jitka Klimešová conducts her research at the Institute of Botany of the Czech Academy of Sciences and her main interest is plant functional morphology. Her research interests include creating a database of clonal and bud bank traits for the flora of Central Europe, testing the functionality of morphological traits in experiments, and doing evolutionary analyses of different plant traits and environmental parameters for the whole flora.