Analyzing photos from the spring Turkish hike, I decided to read about the carob tree on Wikipedia under which we spent a couple of nights there. It looks very similar to an acacia, only the pods and leaves are larger and oilier.
And so it turned out – carob and acacia belong to the same family of legumes. What do you mean, beans? Why? Are these trees really not directly related to such trees, but rather to herbs like clover, peas and beans? I realized that I had discovered another gap in my education.
For some reason, in my imagination (not quite consciously), the plants were systematized like this:
Like, there is an insurmountable abyss between grass and trees, these are different sub-kingdoms (families) and there can be no cross-kinship between them – a tree needs to look for relatives among the trees. And the well-known fact that the palm is a grass (and not a tree) seemed to be just an exception that proves the rule.
But in fact, it turns out that the life form of a plant (tree, shrub, grass) is not any important factor for determining kinship. For example, in the “pink” family there are trees (apple, plum, mountain ash) and bushes (rose hips, raspberries) and herbaceous (strawberries). And despite the external differences, there is more relationship between mountain ash and strawberries than between mountain ash and oak.
After all, we do not attribute the lap dog to cats, and the Rottweiler to wild boars based on the similarity of their sizes. Moreover, the life form of a plant (tree, shrub, grass) is a very fickle thing. Once in bad conditions, the tree tries to survive by creeping along the ground and taking the form of a bush, and the grass in good conditions is not at all averse to growing up to three meters and becoming woody.
I don’t understand why I didn’t notice this before. At school, I was very fond of biology and thought that I knew it well. It’s scary to think at what level my knowledge is in less favorite subjects.
Haven’t we been told about the classification of plants? Didn’t they give examples? If I heard one day that acacia and beans are related, and this fact would not be forgotten.
Already in my adult life, I dug into Wikipedia many times, studying the plants that interested me. And I never paid attention to the fact that the apple tree and the strawberry belong to the same family.
Sadly…
To lighten the mood a little, I will give a couple more examples of kinship that seemed interesting to me.
Did you know that a lot of garden trees are plums? Cherries are plums (Prunus cerasus), apricots are plums (Prunus armeniaca), peach, cherry plum and even almonds (Prunus dulcis) are also plums. And both oak and chestnut belong to the beech family.
то самое рожковое дерево в Турции