Evolution of herbs: key to the conundrum might be tolerance not avoidance

AimsWoody plants represent the ancestral growth form in angiosperms with herbs evolving repeatedly from them. While there are a number of hypotheses about drivers of the evolution of the herbaceous habit, the ability to avoid frost damage in winter by discarding their aboveground biomass has often been invoked as the main force in their evolution. We propose instead that any unpredictable disturbance might have been much more important than the seasonal frost, as herbs easily survive repeated disturbance.