Lignins are essential for plants to establish vasculo-skeletal structures and intercellular impermeability. To do so each cell wall layer and cell type adjusts differently the spatial distribution, concentration and chemistry of their lignins (Pesquet et al., 2025). Abiotic conditions like water availability, geographical location and climate set specific adaptive pressures on plants. To date only few reports define how abiotic stresses affect lignins at the cellular and subcellular levels, and how these changes in lignins control plant adaptation to various climate conditions. To understand the adaptation of plants to various habitats by lignins, we investigated multiple accessions of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana varying in both geographical and climate conditions. Analysis of differences in genes associated with lignin formation revealed variation of enzymatic specificity between and within mutligenic families. Growth analysis of these different accessions in standardize conditions revealed extreme phenotypical variability in stem vasculo-skeletal structures, which depended on variation in both the spatial distribution and spatial chemistry of lignins at the cellular and subcellular levels rather than on bulk lignin concentration in stems. We thus show that plant adaptation to changing environments depends on cell type specific regulation of lignins rather than on overall changes in stem lignins. This highlights the importance of determining the spatial chemistry of lignins (Blaschek et al., 2024) to prevent averaging errors, and offers great perspectives in bioengineering strategies to change lignins in plant biomass without hampering plant growth and environmental resilience.