Most people love trees for their beauty, but trees are valuable in many practical ways, too. For many centuries, the seafaring peoples of the world used trees to make their ships. Wood from trees provides fuel and lumber for houses, furniture, and tools. From wood pulp are made some textiles, paper, and plastics. Millions of trees are cut for utility and telephone poles. Trees produce most commercially grown fruits and nearly all the nuts. Chocolate, coffee, maple sugar, a number of spices (including nutmeg, mace, cloves, allspice, and cinnamon), and olive, almond, and coconut oils come from trees. They supply many medicines, cork, dyes, rubber, turpentine, gums, and resins. They also help preserve the land and plant and animal life (see forest and forestry).
Trees are tall woody plants that regularly renew their growth. Most plants classified as trees have one main trunk, or stem, that contains woody tissues. In most species the trunk produces secondary limbs, called branches. The stem often has no branches for several feet above the ground. At the top it may have a crown of branches and leaves. Most trees grow to 15 feet (4.5 meters) or more in height, and some are much taller. Shrubs are smaller. They branch close to the ground and have many stems.
It is not hard to tell most trees apart. The leaf gives the simplest clue to the kind of tree because no two kinds have exactly the same shape of leaf. Flowers and seeds also differ with every kind of tree. The shape of the tree and the way it branches, the form of the twigs and buds, and the texture of the bark are also used to identify trees.
A person can start the study of trees by making a collection of pressed leaves. One can also make interesting records of leaves, flowers, and seeds by means of simple prints. Collecting twigs and studying their buds and leaf scars is also revealing. They differ with every kind of tree. (See also leaf; plant.)
Botanists divide trees into two main groups, called coniferous and broad-leaved. Those in the first group bear cones and usually have needle-shaped leaves. Among them are the pine, hemlock, spruce, redwood, cedar, and cypress. Most conifers keep their leaves all year, and those that do are called evergreens.
Trees of the second group have broad, flat leaves. Most of them shed their leaves in winter and are therefore called deciduous. The word comes from the Latin de and cadere, meaning “to fall from.” The oak, maple, elm, beech, ash, linden, sycamore, and willow are common deciduous trees.
Some of the redwoods and giant sequoias of California and Oregon grow to be more than 300 feet (90 meters) high, and some bristlecone pines may be nearly 5,000 years old. But even the huge size and great age of these trees are not as wonderful as their eternal youth. Between the bark and the wood is a layer of cells called cambium. Cambium is perpetually youthful tissue. The cells at the tip of every twig grow just like cells in a newly sprouted seedling. The botanist Augustin Pyrame de Candolle believed that trees die from injury or disease and not from old age.
A tree has three main parts. The roots anchor it in the ground. They absorb water and dissolve minerals. The trunk and branches carry a watery fluid known as sap and hold the leaves in the sunlight. The leaves make food.
A tree grows higher and wider as its twigs and branches lengthen at the tips. Meanwhile the branches, twigs, and trunk grow thicker. Conifers and most deciduous trees add thickness. Every year the cambium adds a layer of new cells to the older wood. Each layer forms a ring. By counting the rings one can tell the age of the tree. They are thick in years of good rainfall and thin in poor years. Tree rings give a clue to climatic conditions in past centuries.
There may, however, be false rings, caused by interruptions of the water supply in the growing season. Drought, frost, fire, or disease may cause false or partial rings. A dry year may also result in a missing ring. A true annual ring can be identified by its sharp outer edge; a false ring, by its fuzzy border.
Water and minerals travel up from the roots to the leaves in sap within the new layers of wood inside the cambium. Hence this part of the trunk is called sapwood (or xylem). Other sap carries food down from the leaves through a layer called phloem inside the bark.
Palm trees have no cambium. The woody fibers in the pithy mass of the trunk carry sap up and down. The trunk grows only at the top from a terminal bud.
As a tree grows, the older sapwood stiffens with a hard material (lignin) and loses connection with the leaves. Then it just stores water. At last it becomes solid heartwood. Heartwood makes the best lumber. If it decays, a tree surgeon can replace it just as a dentist fills a decayed tooth. A tree’s roots grow at the tips like branches and twigs. Many trees send a main taproot straight down. It may grow to a great depth seeking water.
While the cambium makes the tree trunk and its branches grow in size, the leaves produce the food that builds the tissues of the tree. Using the energy from sunlight, the green coloring matter in the leaves (chlorophyll) takes carbon dioxide out of the air. It combines the carbon dioxide with water and dissolved minerals from the roots to form sugars and starches. One cannot see the food-making process at work, but one can feel a result of it in the woods on a hot summer day. In the shade, the air is cool and fresh. The leaves cut off the glare of the sun and reduce heat by breathing out tons of water vapor into the air. This water was soaked up by the roots and carried to the leaves through the sapwood. The water not used in making food is breathed out into the air through pores in the leaf. Moreover, leaves purify the air by taking out carbon dioxide and giving back oxygen. (For more details about food making, see photosynthesis; leaf; plant.)
The roots of trees keep soil from washing or blowing away. Leaf mold adds richness to soil. Thick mats of leaves and roots on the ground soak up rainwater and keep it from draining rapidly into streams and rivers. (See also conservation; forest and forestry.)
On one summer day a medium-sized apple tree soaks up about 800 pounds, or 94 gallons (356 liters), of water. Leaf pores then give out about 96 percent of the water to the air. The leaves use only about 4 percent for food making. Thus forests act as reservoirs of rainwater, whereas deforested regions are subject to floods and erosion (see flood control).
Among unusual trees are the tropical mangrove and banyan. From their extended branches they send down roots that grow into supporting trunks. Thus each tree becomes a grove. The baobab, or monkey-bread tree, grows immensely broad without growing proportionately tall. Its trunk may be 20 to 30 feet (6 to 9 meters) in diameter but only 60 to 70 feet (18 to 21 meters) high. Its branches, 50 to 60 feet long and each as thick as a good-sized tree, sweep the ground with their foliage. South American forests have several different cow trees. They yield a creamy, pleasant-tasting juice, which is said to serve as a milk substitute. These are related to the rubber trees. The “deadly upas tree” of southeastern Asia was once believed to have a poisonous breath that was fatal to any living creature within 10 miles. This has proved to be a fable; but the real upas has a poisonous juice.
According to tradition, Buddha received enlightenment under the Bo tree in India. The original tree has vanished, but a Bo tree in Sri Lanka, said to be over 2,000 years old, is venerated by Buddhists as having sprung from a slip of the sacred tree. A member of the fig genus, its scientific name is Ficus religiosa. The Royal Oak (long since destroyed) sheltered Charles II, king of England, after Oliver Cromwell defeated him at Worcester in 1651. In the Charter Oak (blown down in 1856) at Hartford, Conn., patriots hid the Connecticut charter when the British administrator Edmund Andros demanded its surrender in 1687. Under the Washington Elm (died of old age in 1923) at Cambridge, Mass., George Washington assumed command of the Continental Army in 1775. In Mexico City is the preserved trunk of a cypress, the Tree of the Sorrowful Night, under which the Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés rested after his defeat by the Aztec in 1520.
The coast redwoods of California and Oregon are the world’s tallest trees. Second to them is the Australian mountain ash, a type of eucalyptus. Probably the largest in circumference is the Tree of Tule, which measures about 150 feet (45 meters) around. It is in a village churchyard southwest of Oaxaca, Mexico. It is a cypress (Taxodium mucronatum), called in English the Montezuma cypress, and in Spanish the ahuehuete. Its age has been estimated to be more than 2,000 years.
Trees cannot grow in deserts, on high mountaintops, or near the poles. Willow and birch, stunted to shrubs, grow farther north than any other woody plants. The Arctic regions, from about latitude 70° N., are rimmed with conifers. These trees also make up the highest forest belt on the mountains of the northern latitudes and extend into the temperate lowlands. Broad-leaved trees, such as the oak, maple, elm, willow, and ash, flourish in the north temperate zone. In the tropics leaves become broader or the fine-leaved foliage becomes denser.
Some evergreens grow in the tropical regions of the Southern Hemisphere, notably the Araucaria group. They nowhere dominate as northern conifers do in the Far North. The tough, stunted Antarctic beech is the chief forest growth on the chill coasts of the tip of South America.
The conifers and other naked seeded trees (gymnosperms) are the most primitive of all seed plants and extend far back in geological time. The giant sequoias of California and the towering redwoods of California and southwestern Oregon are the only survivors of an ancient and once widely distributed group. The scattered Araucarias of the Southern Hemisphere are the remnants of another formerly widespread clan. The cycads are the most primitive of all trees. Many fossil remains are known. Living genera grow in the tropical zones of both hemispheres. They resemble palms or giant ferns. The trunk has no branches. It grows 20 to 60 feet (6 to 18 meters) tall and has a cluster of large palmlike leaves at the top. The cycads live to be a thousand years old. The ginkgo, or maidenhair tree, has an ancestry that goes back to the Permian Period (about 300 to 250 million years ago).
The broad-leaved trees with enclosed seeds (angiosperms) are more highly developed and younger in geological time. Some of them were more widespread in ancient times than they are today.
The science of trees is called dendrology (from the Greek word dendron for “tree”). Among the lower, or nonseed-bearing, orders of plants, the tropical tree fern is the only one that may be called a tree. It grows from spores instead of from seeds. There are two great divisions of seed-bearing plants. The gymnosperms have naked, exposed seeds borne on cones that take the place of flowers. The angiosperms are flowering plants. They enclose their seeds in a seedcase, or ovary, which ripens into a fruit or pod.
The gymnosperms are divided into four orders: Cycadales, to which the cycads belong; Ginkgoales, represented only by the ginkgo, or maidenhair tree; Gnetales, desert shrubs, woody climbers, and small trees found only in tropical forests; and, most important, Pinales, the conifers. The conifers are divided into seven families: Pinaceae (pine, larch, spruce, fir, hemlock, Douglas fir), Cupressaceae (cedar, cypress, bald cypress, redwood, sequoia), Taxaceae (yew), Araucariaceae (monkey puzzle tree, Norfolk Island pine), Sciadopityaceae (umbrella pine), Podocarpaceae (yellowwood, New Zealand red pine, celery-top pine), and Cephalotaxaceae (plum-yew).
The angiosperms include the familiar broad-leaved trees. They have sometimes been divided into two classes according to the number of their seed leaves. Those with one seed leaf are monocotyledons. The only true trees in this group are palms. Other “monocots” that are often called trees include the banana and bamboos, which are giant grasses. By far, the greatest number of tree species are dicotyledons, or “dicots,” with two seed leaves.
Among the earliest flowering trees to evolve were those in the families Lauraceae (bay laurel, avocado, cinnamon, sassafras), Magnoliaceae (magnolia, tulip tree), Annonaceae (custard apple, lancewood, pawpaw), and Myristicaceae (nutmeg tree). These trees are primitive dicots.
The rest of the flowering trees are considered eudicots, or “typical dicots.” They are characterized by pollen that has three grooves or pores. The most primitive of these trees include those in the families Buxaceae (boxwood), Proteaceae (macadamia, banksia, silky oak), and Platanaceae (plane tree, sycamore).
The greatest number of trees belong to the group known as the core eudicots. The plants of this group typically have a similar arrangement of flower parts, with each flower having five sepals, five petals, five or 10 stamens, and three or five carpels (which make up the pistil; see flower, “The Chief Parts of a Flower”).
The core eudicots include the very large groups known as rosids and asterids. The rosids are named after the rose order, which includes the great rose family, Rosaceae. The trees of this family bear many valuable fruits—apples, pears, peaches, apricots, quinces, plums, cherries, and almonds. Mountain ash and hawthorn are also part of the rose family. Many other well-known and economically important trees are rosids. Among them are those in the families Myrtaceae (myrtle, eucalyptus, callistemon, guava), Fabaceae (acacia, locust, honey locust), Betulaceae (birch, alder, hornbeam), Fagaceae (oak, beech, chestnut, chinquapin), Juglandaceae (walnut, hickory, pecan), Salicaceae (willow, poplar, aspen, cottonwood), Rhamnaceae (buckthorn), Moraceae (mulberry, fig, breadfruit, banyan), and Ulmaceae (elm). Others include Cannabaceae (hackberry), Caricaceae (papaya), Malvaceae (cacao, or chocolate, kapok, balsa, baobab, cola, linden, durian), Sapindaceae (maple, buckeye, horse chestnut), Rutaceae (citrus such as orange, lemon, lime, grapefruit), Anacardiaceae (sumac, cashew, pistachio, mango, quebracho), and Meliaceae (mahogany, neem).
The asterids, named for the aster order, contain a great number of plant species. Among the asterid trees are those in the families Cornaceae (dogwood), Lecythidaceae (Brazil nut), Ebenaceae (ebony, persimmon), Rubiaceae (cinchona), Bignoniaceae (catalpa, jacaranda), Oleaceae (olive, ash), and Aquifoliaceae (holly).