While admiring the curly crown of the beautiful mountain ash, many do not suspect that in nature there are 84 species of this plant, supplemented by a considerable number of hybrid forms. Rowan settled in the Northern Hemisphere, having mastered its temperate zone. 34 species grow in the Russian expanses, some of which have been cultivated and used as ornamental shrubs.
Views are significantly different from each other. The color of berries and bark, rowan leaf and other features are different for each variety. There are very few real mountain ash in the forests, they are rare. Basically, the unique beauty of a person pleases rowan undergrowth - miniature deciduous trees 3-6 meters high. The most common and well-known type of shrub trees is the mountain ash.
Which rowan leaves: complex or simple?
The shape of the leaves of mountain ash is varied. When you look at leaves from differenttrees, you involuntarily ask yourself: "A rowan leaf is complex or simple?" According to biologists, there are complex, pinnate, and simple rowan leaves. Actually, the structure of the leaves determines the division of the shrub into two main subgenera.
Trees with feathery leaves forming openwork crowns are classified as real mountain ash. Trees of the second subgenus, thanks to simple solid, serrated-lobed and lobed leaves, are distinguished by fairly dense crowns.
The value of real mountain ash is higher. Most of them produce edible healing bittersweet berries. Regardless of how a rowan leaf looks like, all types of trees are widely used in landscape design when arranging all kinds of landscape gardening. Shrubs are great as tapeworms and look great in group arrangements and regular alleys.
After all, in decorativeness, the tree successfully competes with competitors (of which, by the way, there are few), taking away the palm from individual plants. It is beautiful in any season. And when it sparkles with openwork spring foliage. And when it shines with a white boil of inflorescences. And when it burns with a bright fire of foliage, touched by autumn crimson, fiery red bunches of tart berries, especially powdered with the first snow.
Biological description of rowan leaf
In the spring, when rowan buds are just about to bloom, it's hard to tell what kind of bush we have in front of us. The tree is well recognizable, in which the leaves are completely unfolded. After all, everyoneoriginal rowan leaf sign. Whether it was a photo, a drawing, but everyone saw it. Admired them more than once in a park, forest or garden.
The common petiole is covered with many large pinnate small leaves. The construction scheme of each is elementary. It is assembled from several pairs of miniature leaves. Its apex is decorated with an unpaired individual leaf. Various sources give a more accurate description of the mountain ash leaf - plants from the Rosaceae family.
The length of unpaired pinnate leaves reaches 10-20 centimeters. The long thin reddish petiole is studded with 7-15 practically sessile broadly lanceolate or elongated, pointed, serrated along the edge, miniature leaves (3-5 cm long), entire from the lower end and sharply serrate at the apex.
Rowan leaves in spring and summer
In the spring, a thick fluff is clearly visible on the leaves. They are covered with hairs both above and below. By summer, the hairs will fall off, the delicate fluff will disappear, exposing the surface, just like it happens with other trees, for example, with aspens. The fluff of hairs prevents the rapid evaporation of the liquid that saturates the young fragile leaf blades.
In summer, usually dull, leathery and rough leaves, painted on top in dull green tones, the felt gray bottom shines with pale bluish hues, almost close to white-silver color.
Rowan leaves in autumn
Green in summer, rowan leaves go through three color stages in autumn. Yellow at the beginning, they gradually acquire shadesorange (light to intense). And in the end they are painted in a crimson color palette. The autumn crown of the plant glows with golden, orange and terracotta tones.
Foliage, obsolete, begins to fall. But mountain ash does not lose whole sheets (unlike many other trees and shrubs). The constituent parts fall off one by one from the pinnate leaf. He, losing miniature leaves one by one, seems to be falling apart.
The petiole of a huge leaf is gradually exposed. And only when completely exposed, the main brick-red vein parted with the plant, flying away from it last.
Foliage of unusual mountain ash
When they talk about the grace of a tree, the charms of its bunches and the unusual openwork of crowns, they usually mean mountain ash. However, the world abounds in other luxurious types of mountain ash, although they are much rarer.
Types of whole-leaved mountain ash have unique biological features that make their decorative effect very attractive. The beauty of their whole, often pubescent leaves deserves special attention.
Rowan Aria
Unusual whole-leaved tree dotted Western European sparse forests. It, rising up to 10-12 m, spreads its luxurious crown in breadth by 6-8 m.
The shape of the rowan leaf Aria is similar to those that are sprinkled with alder branches. It is solid, rounded-elliptical, leathery, with a pointed or blunt apex, acute-double-serrate along the edges,reaches a size of 14 x 9 cm. Its top is juicy green in the middle of summer, and the bottom is white-felt, grayish, as if powdered with flour.
Therefore, in Russian it is called powdery mountain ash. The tree, gleaming with silvery foliage shimmering in the breeze, effectively contrasts against the colorful background formed by the surrounding plants.
I wonder then what color rowan leaves are in autumn? Aria's autumn foliage is colored in a special way. Its immense crown shines with chic bronze hues with the onset of autumn.
Sorbus intermediate
This species, often called Swedish mountain ash, is represented by solitary slender trees 10-15 meters high, growing wild in Central European, B altic and Scandinavian forests. A single rowan leaf, photographed by professionals and amateurs, is very thin.
Above in summer it is dark green, below it is pubescent with gray hairs, reddish in autumn. The shape of shallow, on average twelve-centimeter whole leaves is oblong-ovate. Decorative silvery foliage forms an original oval crown around a smooth greyish trunk.
Sorbus elderberry
Shrubs scattered over the undergrowth and independent thickets of mountain ash settled in the expanses of the Khabarovsk Territory, Kamchatka and Sakhalin. They captured the Okhotsk coast, the Kuriles and penetrated into Japan. Shrub trees are distinguished by their relatively low height (up to two and a half meters), straight, naked, darkish-brown offspring with a bluish bloom, roundedovoid discharged crown.
Unpaired 18 cm leaves are concentrated on gray branches with clearly defined lenticels. Petioles of terracotta scale are studded with oval-lanceolate sharp-serrated leaves, almost naked, glossy dark green. Their number varies from 7 to 15.
Rowan Köhne and Vilmorena
These original straight-stemmed trees are representatives of the Chinese flora. For habitat, they chose the forests covering the temperate and warm zones in Central China. Vilmorena differs from Köhne in greater height (the first is up to 6 m, the second is up to 3 m) and the crown is decorative.
Crowns of plants are sprinkled with pinnate leaves. 12-25 leaves fit on 20 cm petioles, the edges of which are sharply serrate from tip to base. The seasonal rhythm of these plants is very close. The autumn leaf of the mountain ash is colored in purple, red-violet colors.
Foliage of mountain ash Glogovina
Medicinal bereka (the second name of the plant) can be found in the Caucasus and Crimea. She captured part of the Ukrainian lands, those that stretched across the south-west of the country. Its natural range is spread across Western Europe and Asia Minor. Single trees and compact groups are continually encountered in the undergrowth and shrubbery, in the second layer of forests and on sunny slopes.
Slender 25-meter rowan trees are covered with rounded crowns. The offspring shimmer with olive hues. Relic trees are dark gray, furrowedcracks. Possessing a long (up to 17 centimeters) plate, the rowan leaf is simple, broadly ovate.
The plate at the base is rounded heart-shaped, and its tip is pointed. It is with finely serrated edges, equipped with 3-5 sharp blades. Its top is glossy, dark green, and the bottom is hairy-pubescent. The autumn palette of leaf blades varies from yellow to orange.
There are two varieties of Glogovina: pinnately dissected and with pubescent foliage. Both form magnificent solo, group and avenue plantings.
Sorbus alderleaf
Primorye, Japan, Korea and China were affected by isolated and grouped trees with narrow pyramidal crowns of mountain ash. They scattered over broad-leaved and cedar forests. Straight, shiny dark brown trunks, looking up to the sky, reach a height of 18 meters.
Distinctive features of the leaves are in simple, broadly oval, sharply serrated forms, distinctly expressed venation, in the length of a dense leaf blade, not exceeding 10 cm. Their outlines are similar to alder leaves. Hence the name of the tree.
Spring light green rowan leaf casts a slightly bronze bloom. In the summer leaf, the lower surface is yellowish, and the upper surface is intense dark green. Autumn shines with juicy bright orange hues. The tree is especially beautiful at the time of spring flowering and autumn leaf fall.
