Evolutionary developmental biology, cladistic analyses, and paleontological insights make it increasingly clear that regulatory mechanisms operating during embryogenesis and early maturation tend to be highly conserved over great evolutionary time scales, which can account for the conservative nature of the body plans in the major plant and animal clades. At issue is whether morphological convergences in body plans among evolutionarily divergent lineages are the result of adaptive convergence or ‘genome recall’ and ‘process orthology’. The body plans of multicellular photosynthetic eukaryotes (‘plants’) are reviewed, some of their important developmental/physiological regulatory mechanisms discussed, and the evidence that some of these mechanisms are phyletically ancient examined. We conclude that endosymbiotic lateral gene transfers, gene duplication and functional divergence, and the co-option of ancient gene networks were key to the evolutionary divergence of plant lineages.