When I read this nursery rhyme, I was less than 8 years old and lived in a small town in the south. The most common street tree in that city is banyan, a common tree in the south.
Platanus acerifolia, Platanus acerifolia and birch.
Robusta)- Betula platyphylla is not a birch, but a plant of Dipterocarpaceae, although its name also has "Betula". Therefore, for a long time after I learned to write the word "birch", I had no idea about the appearance of birch.
Betulaceae, where birch is located, is not far from the Fagaceae where we eat chestnuts. Almost all of them are typical deciduous trees in the north temperate zone. Betulaceae also includes hazel plants with crisp and delicious seeds wrapped in chocolate, and Putuo Carpinus, which only exists in the south of the Yangtze River, and only one wild plant is extremely endangered.
Left: white birch; Top right: C. avellana, bottom right: Carpinus putuo. Photo: Hiroya Minakuchi/Minden Pictures; Horst Frank/Wikimedia; alchetron.com
A remarkable feature of betulaceae plants is the catkin [tí] inflorescence-their humble florets are unisexual, divided into female flowers and male flowers, and the male flowers are closely arranged in spikes, which are soft and drooping; Female inflorescences grow into short spikes or pinecones on another branch, and each female flower is covered by a layer of bracteoles. Most of the time, these inflorescences open in cold spring and lack of pollinators before new leaves grow every year, and pollinate by wind. After summer, the female inflorescence of successfully pollinated Betula platyphylla will form a fruit sequence similar to that of a pine cone. When ripe, the two short-winged fruits are as light as a feather, and the autumn wind blows them out of the fruit sequence and falls to the New World to take root and sprout.
Drooping male inflorescence and erect female inflorescence of Betula platyphylla. Photography: Peter Schoenfeld
Just as pine, cypress and maple refer to a kind of tree in botany, "birch" is also the general name of about 30 ~ 60 species of birch in betulaceae. Among them, "Betula platyphylla", as a proprietary Chinese name, refers to Betula platyphylla (B.
Platyphylla is a species widely distributed in East Asia, including East Siberia, Northeast China, North China, Northwest China and Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.