This is one of my favourite articles! But as someone who has recently become interested in botany, what I find really crazy about this is that there are so many

This is one of my favourite articles! But as someone who has recently become interested in botany, what I find really crazy about this is that there are so many different ways for plants to become trees. A listing (surely incomplete): • Normal trees, like what you see every day, with bark and wood and so on • Monocots like yucca and aloe and Draecena, which have no bark and become woody through ‘abnormal secondary growth’ (which I don’t properly understand but has something to do with wood development being scattered throughout the plant instead of in a ring around the edge), and tend to avoid branching except when the growing tip is disturbed • Other monocots like palm trees and Strelitzias, where the ‘wood’ is actually the bases of dead leaves wrapped very very tightly together, firmly enough to keep the plant standing up • Fern trees, which… I’m not at all sure about, but seem to work on the same principle where leaf bases sorta get fused together. But the Dicksonia in my front yard seems to extrude some sort of thin fiber — does that perhaps help to hold the trunk together in some way? • And then there’s things like papaya and banana and giant horsetails, which become trees without any wood at all, and have presumably innovated other ways of holding themselves up It’s interesting to walk around my neighbourhood and realise that many of the trees I see have evolved almost completely different methods to get to the same result!