In article ,
"Jeff Layman" writes:
| K wrote:
| Charlie Pridham writes
|
| Sadly there is no scenario where being evergreen in a cold exposed
| location is an advantage (apart from to gardeners!)
|
| Though it's a strategy which works for a lot of conifers.
|
| Indeed - they will grow in extreme conditions where little else does. And
| considering conifers have been around for an extraordinary long time, one
| wonders why a climbing conifer has never evolved (would it be identifiable
| from fossil records anyway?).

There are prostrate ones. In extreme conditions, there is rarely much
point in climbing - there isn't any shortage of space, and often nothing
to climb up. It might well be identifiable.

However, conifers are widely distributed throughout the temperate
regions, but do seem to have lost their structural adaptability
as they differentiated. There is very little variation in ANY
such aspect, compared to even much smaller clades of angiosperms.

I can't even guess why.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.