Angelica gigas, also called Korean angelica, giant angelica, purple parsnip, and dangquai, is a monocarpic biennial or short lived perennial plant from Korea and China. It inhabits forests, grasslands and banks of streams. The roots are used in traditional Chinese medicine.
Phytomorphology is the study of the physical form and external structure of plants. This is usually considered distinct from plant anatomy, which is the study of the internal structure of plants, especially at the microscopic level. Plant morphology is useful in the visual identification of plants. Recent studies in molecular biology started to investigate the molecular processes involved in determining the conservation and diversification of plant morphologies. In these studies, transcriptome conservation patterns were found to mark crucial ontogenetic transitions during the plant life cycle which may result in evolutionary constraints limiting diversification.