Compared with dicots, monocots are believed to be the more recent products of plant evolution and include grasses, cereal grains (wheat, oats, barley, rice, rye), sugar cane, bamboo, palms, lilies, irises, and orchids. Dicots, the larger group, encompass everything from roses and rhododendrons to ash trees and asters. In addition to cotyledon numbers, other features, to be described later, characterize these two groups of angiosperms.
