David Ackerly and Russ Monson took on a daunting task in organizing the symposium that led to this collection of papers: identifying a representative set of studies of plant function that together might point the way to a coherent field of evolutionary inquiry into plant functional biology. In their introduction to this proceedings, Ackerly and Monson speak of "waking the sleeping giant"--the study of the evolutionary foundations of plant function. This is indeed a potentially coherent and exciting field of inquiry and perhaps the best hope for rejuvenation of the study of plants as whole organisms. It is interesting that although the main lines of inquiry fell into place rather quickly after Darwin's publication of the Origin of Species, the field has yet to come into sharp focus. The deep roots of the science are perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the work of A. E W. Schimper, a leading figure in late 19th-century botanical studies. In the foreword to the English translation of Schimper's 1898 Pflanzen-Geographie aufphysiologischer Grundlage, Percy Groom at Oxford outlines Schimper's surprisingly modern approach to his work on the nature of plant adaptation: