The first comprehensive treatment of plant biomechanics. "Niklas analyzes plant form and provides a far deeper understanding of how form is a response to basic physical laws. He examines the ways in which these laws constrain the organic expression of form, size, and growth in a variety of plant structures, and in plants as whole organisms, and he draws on the fossil record as well as on studies of extant species to present a genuinely evolutionary view of the response of plants to abiotic as well as biotic constraints" (Publisher).

The first book to apply allometry— one definition of which is the study of the growth rate of an organism's parts in relation to the whole — to studies of the evolution, morphology, physiology, and reproduction of plants.