dannoffs [he/him]

According to OP’s definition:

Woody ✅

Secondary growth (feathers) ✅

Not a monocot ✅

Fuck it, birds are trees.

There’s no way you actually read that.

It’s literally a blog post of one person’s opinion which concludes without a definitive statement, that it’s not settled if they’re trees or not, and then links to a page “for further reading” that categorizes them under trees.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C3&q=coconut+tree

Someone should tell the authors of these hundreds of papers then.

You do realize the qualifiers you edited in are exactly my point and directly contradict your post, right?

This is a reminder that there is no universally accepted botanical definition of tree. It is also a reminder that usage supersedes definition, so pointing out that coconut palm trees aren’t “trees” makes you both annoying and wrong.