Man, at a certain stage of his development, began to adapt nature to himself. He began to tame wild animals that could benefit him. In the same way, cultivated trees, shrubs, grasses, and cereals appeared. In this article, we consider the history of the appearance and characteristics of cultivated plants, in particular trees.
Cultivated plants - what is it?
Culturally called those plants that are grown by a person for any specific purpose. This may be the receipt of food, raw materials for industries, medicines or animal feed. Such plants are also called agricultural crops. Among them, cultural trees, which will be discussed in this article, are especially distinguished.
All cultivated plants are divided into several groups. In particular, stand out:
- cereal crops;
- legumes;
- sugar-bearing;
- starchy;
- oilseeds;
- fruit trees (cultural trees belong to this group);
- vegetable and melon;
- tonic and narcotic.
The study of the characteristics and origin of cultivated plants was carried out by such scientists as N.I. Vavilov, E.V. Wulf, G.I. Tanfiliev, V.L. Mosquitoes and others.
A bit of history
One way or another, and the ancestors of the cultivated are wild-growing plants. With the help of breeding measures, scientists were able to achieve higher yields from them, and thanks to acclimatization, they began to grow and bear fruit in new, unusual conditions.
The VII millennium BC is the time when cultivated crop production began to develop. It was then that the first cultivated plants began to appear - trees, shrubs and cereals.
If we touch upon the issue of geography, it turns out that the processes of cultivating flora by a man simultaneously took place in completely different, distant from each other, areas. At the same time, the foci of the appearance of most cultivated plants were the highlands and mountain systems of the tropical and subtropical zones - the Atlas Mountains, the Caucasus, the Andes, the Armenian and Abyssinian Highlands, etc.
Why exactly them? The fact is that these territories have several obvious advantages:
- protection of slopes from cold winds;
- variety of natural and climatic features (due to altitudinal zonation);
- plenty of heat and sunlight;
- the presence of permanent sources of water.
The famous scientist N.I. Vavilov in the 20-30s 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.
Cultural trees and their features
Cultivated trees, one way or another, evolved from wild plants. However, they may 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 who they came from.
The main distinguishing feature is that the cultivated tree species do not have their own natural distribution areas.
The cultural tree is a single and integral living system, which consists of two closely related and interacting parts:
- aboveground (trunk and crown);
- underground (root system).
Cultural Trees: Examples
All cultivated trees can be divided into two large groups:
- Decorative - are used for landscaping and to create parks, gardens, squares (these are willows, acacia, thuja, chestnuts, ash, plane tree, etc.).
- Fruit - they are grown to produce fruits and produce food (these are apples, pears, peaches, cherries, plums, quinces, apricots and others).
Apple tree is a genus of trees from the Pink family, which is distinguished by its delicious sour-sweet fruits of a round shape. Today there are about 10 thousand varieties of this tree! Most of them belong to the species of 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 Ancient Greece became the center of her breeding. It is known that in Kievan Rus, under Yaroslav the Wise, an apple orchard was already laid.
Sweet cherry is a tree from the family of Pinks, with sweet fruits, which is widely cultivated. It is a more thermophilic plant than cherries. Scientists believe that Europeans knew about cherries in the eighth millennium BC.
Peach (Persian plum) is a tree from the Pink family, whose delicious fruits are widely used for the production of canned fruit and peach oil. In particular, this fruit is very popular in the USA. The native land of this tree, presumably, is northern China. In Europe, the first peach orchard was laid in Italy in the 1st century.
