What the cells look like

Six characteristics, and not one of them has to be memorised separately. Every one follows from a single fact: these cells are dividing and have not specialised.

Characteristic	Why it follows
Small living cells	A cell divides before it has had time to grow, so it never gets large. And it is alive — it has to be, to divide.
No intercellular spaces	The cells are packed tightly against one another. Gaps open up later, when cells stop dividing and start to enlarge.
A conspicuously large nucleus	Division is the work of the nucleus, and in a small cell a normal nucleus fills most of the space.
No large central vacuole	A big vacuole is what a cell fills itself with once it has stopped growing. Small vacuoles may be present.
No chloroplasts	These cells are not photosynthesising. They are fed by the rest of the plant while they divide.
Many mitochondria	Dividing is expensive. The organelle that releases the energy is present in large numbers.

The vacuole line is the one people get wrong

The characteristic is no large central vacuole, not no vacuole at all. Small vacuoles can be present. Writing that a meristematic cell has no vacuole is the commonest mistake in this topic.

Read the list backwards and it tells you what a cell becomes

Large vacuole, thickened wall, chloroplasts, gaps between the cells — every one of those is something a meristematic cell lacks and a permanent cell has. The characteristics of the tissues in the rest of this chapter are, almost item for item, this list reversed.