The same Mediterranean scrub goes by garrigue, phrygana, tomillares or batha
Low, soft-leaved scrub rings the Mediterranean, and every shore has its own word for it: garrigue in France, phrygana in Greece, tomillares in Spain, batha in Israel. Shrubland is a whole family of landscapes shaped by drought, salt wind and, above all, fire, which many of its plants actually need.
Ecologists define a shrub as a woody plant under 8 metres tall with many branches and usually several stems. Tall shrubs reach 2 to 8 metres, small ones 1 to 2, and subshrubs stay below a metre. A shrubland is any plant community dominated by them, often mixed with grasses, herbs and bulbs. The term itself dates only from 1903.
Some shrublands are the settled end state of a region's vegetation, kept stable by regular fire or grazing animals. Others are temporary, springing up after a blaze, or the leftovers of forest degraded by logging and overgrazing. Their plants cope with fire in striking ways, producing masses of seed, storing reserves in woody swellings called lignotubers, or germinating only after burning. The same flammability can make these areas risky places for people to live.
Several World Wildlife Fund biomes are shrublands. Desert scrub survives with tiny leaves that limit water loss, thorns against grazers, fleshy water-storing stems and taproots that reach deep groundwater. Mediterranean scrub grows in the five regions with that climate, often near coasts where it tolerates salt air: coastal sage scrub in California, strandveld in South Africa's Western Cape, matorral in central Chile and kwongan in southwest Australia. Interior scrublands occupy poor, semi-arid soils, such as Portugal's matas on ancient Cambrian and Silurian schists, or Florida scrub.
Australia uses a detailed system based on height and foliage cover. Shrubs over 2 metres with 70 to 100 percent cover form closed-shrubs, while sparse cover of 10 to 30 percent counts as tall shrubland; below 2 metres the equivalent dense class is called closed-heath. Even the local wildlife carries the name: the shrubland Morethia skink lives across several Australian states.
Source: Shrubland
