Trees of culture - features and examples

Man, at a certain stage of his development, began to adjust nature to himself. He began to tame wild animals that could benefit him. In the same way, cultural trees, shrubs, grasses and grasses also appeared. In this article, we will review the history of the emergence and features of cultivated plants, in particular trees.

Cultivated plants - what is it?

It is customary to call those plants cultivated by humans for any specific purposes. This can be the receipt of food, raw materials for industries, drugs or animal feed. Such plants are also called agricultural crops. Among them, cultural trees are highlighted, which will be discussed in this article.

All cultivated plants are divided into several groups. In particular, there are:

• Cereal crops;
• Beans;
• Sugar-bearing;
• Starch-containing;
• Oil-bearing;
• Fruit trees (cultural trees belong to this group);
• Vegetable and melon;
• Tonic and narcotic.

The study of the features and origin of cultivated plants involved such scientists as N.I. Vavilov, E.V. Wulf, G.I. Tanfiliev, V.L. Komarov and others.

A bit of history

One way or another, and the ancestors of the cultural are wild plants. With the help of breeding activities, scientists were able to achieve higher yields from them, and through acclimatization they began to grow and bear fruit in new, unusual for themselves conditions.

VII millennium BC - this is the time when the development of cultural crop production began. It was then that the first cultural plants began to appear - trees, bushes and grasses.

If you touch on the issue of geography, it turns out that the processes of cultivation of the human flora in parallel took place in completely different, distant from each other, areas. At the same time, the outbreaks and mountain systems of the tropical and subtropical belt - the Atlas Mountains, the Caucasus, the Andes, the Armenian and the Abyssinian Highlands, became the centers of appearance of the majority of cultivated plants.

Why them? The fact is that these territories are distinguished by several obvious advantages:

• Protection of slopes from cold winds;
• A variety of natural and climatic features (due to high altitude zones);
• An abundance of heat and sunlight;
• Availability of permanent sources of water.

The famous scientist N.I. Vavilov in the 20-30-ies of the twentieth century identified 7 centers of origin of cultivated plants: East Asian, South Asian, South-West Asian, Mediterranean, Central American, South American and Ethiopian.

Trees and their features

Cultural trees, one way or another, came from wild plants. However, they can differ significantly from them. At the same time, some of the trees have changed their appearance so much that it is already very difficult to determine from whom they occurred.

The main distinguishing feature is that the cultural types of trees do not have their own natural distribution areas.

A cultural tree is a single and integral living system that consists of two closely related and interacting parts:

• Aboveground (trunk and crown);
• Underground (root system).

Cultivated trees: examples

All cultural trees can be divided into two large groups:

1. Decorative - are used for landscaping purposes and for creating parks, gardens, squares (these are willows, acacias, thuja, chestnuts, ash, platans, etc.).
2. Fruit - are grown to produce fruits and produce food (this is apple, pear, peach, cherry, plum, quince, apricot and others).

Apple tree is a kind of tree from the family of Roses, which is distinguished by its delicious sweet and sour fruits of round shape. To date, there are about 10 thousand varieties of this tree! Most of them refer to the species Apple tree home. It is believed that the birthplace of a cultivated apple tree is the foothills of Alatau, on the territory of modern Kyrgyzstan. From there she migrated to Europe, where the center of her breeding was Ancient Greece. It is known that in the Kievan Rus, under Yaroslav the Wise, an apple orchard was already laid.

Cherry is a tree from the Roses family, with sweet fruits, which is widely cultivated. It is a more thermophilic plant than cherry. Scientists believe that Europeans knew about cherries even in the eighth millennium BC.

Peach (Persian plum) is a tree from the Pink family, whose tasty fruits are widely used for the production of canned fruit and peach oil. In particular, this fruit is very popular in the US. The native land of this tree, presumably, is northern China. In Europe, the first peach garden was laid in the I century in Italy.

Finally...

Trees of culture bring tremendous benefit to man. They not only give us a lot of valuable and tasty fruits, but also please our eyes in parks and squares. It is difficult to imagine life without cultural trees and plants. At the same time, scientists and breeders continue to bring out their new varieties.