The group of coniferous trees has very ancient history. They appeared on Earth more than 300 million years ago. Modern coniferous represent wood plants among which there are trees and bushes. The most known breeds are pines, fir-trees, firs, cedars, larches, sequoias, cypresses.
Species of coniferous trees
Coniferous forests grow on all continents and often form the whole biosystems within one climatic zone as, for example, a taiga.
The class of coniferous includes several families: pine, cypress, araukariyevy, podokarpovye/nogoplodnikovy, yew. Sometimes allocate still families golovchatotisovy and a taxodium family. The pine group is extensive and includes more than 120 species of a pine, a fir-tree, a fir, a cedar, a larch, a hemlock. Cypresses, a juniper, a sequoia and a thuja, trees and bushes with crosswisely resisting and mutovchaty leaves belong to cypress group. Araukariyevye is an araucaria, agatis, a vollemiya; yew - a yew, torreya.
What is characteristic of coniferous
Trees are divided into broad-leaved and coniferous to type of leaves. At the second leaves rigid acerate, scale-like or flat in the form of strips. Often color of needles dark green for the maximum digestion of light of weak sunshine in a frigid climate or the dense wood.
The big direct trunk and conic krone when the lower branches are longer and wider, than top is characteristic of the majority of large coniferous breeds. If the wood dense the lack of light also takes place, the lower branches die off over time, and the lower part of a trunk remains without boughs. Coniferous belong to the class of gymnospermous, anemogamous plants. On trees men's and female cones (strobila) grow. Strobit microdisputes from men's wind are transferred to women's and pollinate them therefore seeds develop. When scales of cones reveal, seeds fall and get to the earth and also are carried by birds and animals. The majority of coniferous - evergreen plants on which the same leaves remain 2-40 years. The larch, a pseudo-larch, a metasequoia, taksodium and gliptostrobus which dump leaves in the fall belong to exceptions and winter without them.
Interesting facts
Coniferous trees perfectly purify air, give curative essential oils and valuable wood and also produce pitch from which so popular amber turns out. It is difficult to overestimate their advantage and value for ecology.
Almost all record-holder trees on the planet belong to coniferous. The record-holder long-liver is a pine durable of California, judging by quantity of rings of a trunk to it 4700 years. The highest representative of coniferous - the Sequoia sempervirens growing in the west of the USA, reaching more than 115 m in height. A tree with the thickest trunk, taksodium Mexican, has diameter of 11.42 m of Sekvoyadendron huge with a total amount of 1486.9 m³ - the biggest tree. And here the New Zealand dwarfish pine is known for the diminutiveness - usually it reaches no more than 8 cm in height.