A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
scrub
Scrub is vegetation dominated by shrubs and low woody growth rather than by trees or by grass. It occurs as a stage on the way from open ground to woodland, as a permanent state where conditions will not carry trees, and as the product of grazing and burning on ground that once did. It is dense, awkward to cross, and unusually rich in nesting birds and invertebrates.
Etymology
The word is a variant of shrub, and the two split in Middle English along the consonant: shrub took the softened sh- that Old English sc- usually became, while scrub kept the hard sk-, the same fork that gives us shirt and skirt, shatter and scatter. A scrub and a shrub are the same word doing different jobs. The sense of something stunted or inferior came from the vegetation, which is why a scrub also means a small or worthless animal or person, and why the ordinary verb meaning to scour is a separate word entirely.
Notes
Scrub is the habitat conservation has the hardest time with, because it is a stage rather than an endpoint and because it looks like neglect. Left alone it becomes woodland; cut down it becomes grassland; and the species that need it need it to be there continuously somewhere in a landscape, which means the management is a rotation rather than a state. Most of the world’s Mediterranean-climate vegetation, maquis, garigue, chaparral, fynbos, matorral, and phrygana, is scrub.