User:Buster7/Trees
Maples
[edit]- average 10–45 m (33–148 ft) height. Some shrubs less than 10 metres tall with small trunks originating at ground level.
- Deciduous, renowned for their autumn leaf colour, but some in southern Asia and the Mediterranean region are evergreen.
- Shade-tolerant when young
- Riparian, understory, or pioneer species rather than climax overstory trees with a few exceptions such as the Sugar Maple.
- Root systems are typically dense and fibrous, inhibiting the growth of other vegetation underneath them.
- Fruit, called samaras, "maple keys", "helicopters", "whirlybirds" or "polynoses" occur in distinctive pairs each containing one seed enclosed in a "nutlet" attached to a flattened wing of fibrous, papery tissue. They are shaped to spin as they fall and to carry the seeds a considerable distance on the wind. People often call them "helicopters" due to the way that they spin as they fall. Maturation is in a few weeks to six months after flowering, with seed dispersal shortly after maturity. One tree can release hundreds of thousands of seeds in one season.
Ramification
[edit]The divergence of the stem and limbs of a tree into smaller ones, i.e. trunk into branches, branches into increasingly smaller branches, etc. Gardeners stimulate the process through pruning, thereby producing a bushier and denser plant.