What is the difference between a tree and a shrub?

Pedro_P

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Choose your fighter: tree or shrub.

It's more complicated than you'd think.
Deposit Photos
▼ It’s a deceptively simple question: What’s the difference between a tree and a shrub?
At first, the answer seems intuitive. Faced with a woody plant, the average person could swiftly categorize each as either tree or shrub, likely based on a set of inarticulable parameters specific and unknown even to them.
But think about the prompt for too long and the easy answer sours. Instead, the individual in question might turn to something they’ve read or heard from a more reliable source, say ornithologist David  Allen Sibley’s pithy bifurcation: “If you can walk under it, it’s a tree; if you have to walk around it, it’s a shrub.”
It only takes a moment more for this explanation to crumble. Sibley’s simplification can’t account for many popular plants.Kolkwitzia amabilis(alias “beauty bush”) supports splendid pink blossoms on dozens of stems like the shrub it is, but can soar a perplexing 12 feet.Viburnum sieboldii, a red berried-bush, can be forcibly pruned by horticulturalists into the shape of an imposing arbor. And whileMagnolia virginianamay look like a bush when it’s young, it eventually matures into a bona fide tree.
Sooner or later, you realize you’re lost in the brambles of your own mind. Because that’s the thing about trees and shrubs: The distinction is less a botanical fact than a feeling, a linguistic quirk, an issue of philosophy. Even botanists can't agree a definition—or if the difference really matters.
Deanna Curtis is the senior curator of woody Plants at the New York  Botanical Garden. She says woody plants, which include shrubs, trees, and lianas (a vine that has its own roots in the soil but climbs up other trees to access the canopy above), exist on a spectrum.  (▪ ▪ ▪)

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Rhett_Bassard

I would have trouble walking under many banyan trees

ukser

hey

niya

Sadly after a few decades may be there will be no shrubs as well.

Viney Mittal

Very informative. Something that simple which really never occurred for a question. The source article itself is well written and even adequately researched. The forum members must be a richer lot by this additional knowledge. Thanx once again..