Mostly unsurprising, given that flowering plants is one of the major divisions of plants, and conifers are most definitely trees and are not flowering. And palm

Mostly unsurprising, given that flowering plants is one of the major divisions of plants, and conifers are most definitely trees and are not flowering. And palm trees are nothing like either flowering trees nor conifers. To me "tree" simply has to do with being big and tall. Just like the term "whale" excludes porpoises and dolphins, purely based on size, with toothed whales and baleen whales being the actual biological subdivisions of cetacean. (and of course with the oddity that dolphins and porpoises are not whales per se, but they are members of toothed whales i.e. odontocetes)