Handbook of Evolutionary Dendrology

By Dr. Donald G. Fulton

About the Book
Experienced foresters and horticulturists can identify hundreds of trees and shrubs in their local and regional areas of interest. Systematic botanists organize plants according to their natural–evolutionary–groupings. Some students may find it helpful to utilize the fruits of the labor of systematic botanists to come to understand the phylogenetic relations existing among the trees and shrubs of a particular region. Handbook of Evolutionary Dendrology presents the most prominent genera of North American softwoods and hardwoods in accord with the findings of evolutionary plant researchers.
About the Author
Dr. Donald G. Fulton holds the bachelor’s degree in botany and zoology, and the doctorate in botanical science education. He has taught and served in administrative positions with the New York City Department of Education and The New York Botanical Garden, as well as with Mercy College and Teachers College, Columbia University. He currently spends summers in Maine, winters in Florida, and two weeks annually in Mexico.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Company
• Release date: Jan 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9798891270961

Book preview

Preface

As of 2015, according to researchers at the Yale School of Forestry, Planet Earth held roughly three trillion trees. That is about half its total from the dawn of agriculture, 10,000 years ago. (34) As the destruction of vegetation in the Amazon and Congo basins, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere, continues apace, the total is without question considerably less today.

The purpose of this work is twofold. First, to establish an organizational framework for beginning students of dendrology. Most students find an organized system helpful in learning a new subject. Some find it essential. This is not to say that the better works on tree and shrub identification and habits are disorganized, but that the organization here offered follows the last three decades of the findings of phylogenetic research.

A second purpose is to emphasize the significance of evolution to this subject. Evolution is the key to all studies in the world of animate objects. It ought not be a separate unit of study in a course, or a separate course in a liberal arts or natural science collection of courses. Evolution drives the chronology of living things, the submicroscopic, the microscopic, and the macroscopic. The pace of evolution varies with the pace of sexual reproduction in organisms. From the human perspective cyanobacteria evolve more rapidly than redwoods because they reproduce more rapidly.

This work relies heavily on the work of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group and other angiosperm and gymnosperm phylogenetic researchers. They, of course, were preceded by paleobotanists and plant taxonomists whose work was and continues to be valuable. Today, paleobotany and taxonomy continue to provide valuable insights and perspectives which genetic phylogeny is unable to reach. Plant taxonomy and paleobotany evolve, and it is expected that their views today will be modified in the future. Still, the Cronquist system (7) of plant taxonomy and paleobotany four decades in is 75% congruent with the view of flowering plants today (this author’s rough estimate) even with the insights of the advent and development of molecular phylogenetics. The grand outline of plant evolution has been known for some time: freshwater algae gave rise to land plants less than a half billion years ago; these plants, over millennia, gave rise to the ancestors of ferns and their allies, which gave rise to the ancestors of gymnosperms around 380 million years ago. These gave rise to the ancestors of angiosperms around 160 million years ago.