Narrative

Japanese Pittosporum (Pittosporum tobira) is native to Japan and China, and is establish in North America. This shrub or small tree grows to about 15 feet tall. The flowers are white to yellow.

The yellow color will help identify this lifeform. This lifeform is frequentlhy domesticated.

This lifeform is found in the Orient (China, Japan, Korea.) This non-native lifeform is now locally established in North America..

Pittosporum genus is native to the lands around the Indian Ocean including South Africa, India, southeast Asia, Australia, Japan, and China. This genus is also found in Hawaii. There are about 200 species of shrubs and trees in this genus. Many of them are evergreen. The leaves are usually entire. There are about 15 species established in greater North America.

Pittosporum Family (Pittosporum) contains about 200 to 250 species native to and distributed in the Old World. There are 15 species in two genera now growing in greater North America.

Rose Group (Order Rosales) contains many large and very important families. Included here are fruit trees in the family Rosaceae, the nitrogen fixing plants like clover and alfalfa (in the family Leguminosae), and a large assemblage of plants divided into over fifteen different families.

Dicots (Dicotyledoneae Class) are the predominant group of vascular plants on earth. With the exception of the grasses (Monocots) and the Conifers (Gymnosperms), most of the larger plants that one encounters are Dicots. Dicots are characterized by having a seed with two outer shell coverings.

Some of the more primitive Dicots are the typical hardwood trees (oaks, birches, hickories, etc). The more advanced Dicots include many of the Composite (Aster) Family flowers like the Dandelion, Aster, Thistles, and Sunflowers. Although many Monocots reach a very high degree of specialization, most botanists feel that the Dicots represent the most advanced group of plants.

Seed plants (Phylum Embryophyta) are generally grouped into one large phylum containing three major classes: the Gymnosperms, the Monocots, and the Dicots. (Some scientists separate the Gymnosperms into a separate phylum and refer to the remaining plants as flowering plants or Angiospermae.)

For North American counts of the number of species in each genus and family, the primary reference has been John T. Kartesz, author of A Synonymized Checklist of the Vascular Flora of the United States, Canada, and Greenland (1994). The geographical scope of his lists include, as part of greater North America, Hawaii, Alaska, Greenland, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.

Kartesz lists 21,757 species of vascular plants comprising the ferns, gymnosperms and flowering plants as being found in greater North America (including Alaska, Hawaii, Greenland, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

There are estimates within the scientific world that about half of the listed North American seed plants were originally native with the balance being comprised of Eurasian and tropical plants that have become established.