Despite the evolution of newfangled true trees over the last few hundred millennia, pseudotrees remain by far the most common large plants across almost every corner of Apterra. Defined by their height and lack of secondary growth, pseudotrees hail from many disparate clades, all converging on a lifestyle centered around growing as tall as possible to overshadow one's competition. The first to evolve were palm-grasses and basket-bushes, followed by large fan-grasses, chain-grasses, and spine-stalks. Not all of these have stood the test of time, like the now-extinct fan-grasses of the Early-to-Middle Muricene Gecko Isles. Overall, though, pseudotrees continue to diversify, producing new forms to adapt to every change their planet undergoes.
Basket-bushes, with their early head-start over other pseudotrees, once dominated woodland environments across tropical, temperate, and arctic regions. By the Middle Muricene, though, they'd been pushed into a smaller array of niches, becoming the most common genus in cold climates. Today, as taigas grow ever larger, this role has suited them well, and they remain extremely numerous across vast ranges. The largest of them reach over 15 meters, though most are shorter to ensure the cold arctic wind does not topple them. Most maintain a basket-like leaf shape, with the rosette emerging horizontally and turning upwards. This formation allows the grass to avoid damage from heavy snow, which simply sloughs off the blades and slides towards the center, where the excess weight can be supported by the sturdy trunk. When the snow melts, it waters the plant, providing more moisture than it would've otherwise received. Consequently, basket-bushes often outcompete other cold-loving pseudotrees in drier regions, such as the boundaries where taiga turns to tundra and no other tall plants can survive. One branch of the group has even begun spreading into cold deserts, where no other plants come close to matching the basket-bushes' size.
Most pseudotrees of the chaingrass family are different from all others in that they lack a hard stem. Instead, chainanas (which now compose the genus Catenomusa) reach heights of eight meters or more by growing each leaf within the sheath of the previous, forming a massive herbaceous stalk made from dozens of layers of petioles. As new blades grow in the center of this structure, the outermost layers split open and fall to the ground, rotting and fertilizing the surrounding soil. This method of growth is extremely successful in the tropics, where chainanas grow rapidly, not needing to expend calories producing energy-intensive woody trunks. On the other hand, their soft "stems" cannot survive freezing temperatures, so this genus is not found outside the small surviving pockets of rain-pseudoforest found in Loxodia, the Gecko Isles, and Choeropica.
Within the chain-grass group, another genus has independently evolved a tree-like shape. The Chaintree (Catenodendron) is a newly-evolved pseudotree, hailing from a different branch of average-sized chaingrasses more closely related to the stairstems. It relies less heavily on animal seed dispersers than its cousins, with its grains readily germinating even if they aren't consumed first. Its blades are arranged in a spiral rosette at the top of its tall stem, derived from the culms of the original chaingrasses. Its unique form of growth leaves its mark on the trunk; a helical pattern of leaf scars can be seen winding its way up the stem. This genus is common in deserts, beaches, and mountains, finding success wherever it can bask in direct sunlight.
Spine-stalks were once on their way to becoming major players in boreal pseudoforests. Unlike basket-bushes, though, the changing world has not been kind to them. While very effective at surviving bouts of extreme cold, these shorter shrub-like plants found themselves choked out by taller, canopy-forming wax-palms and basket-bushes. Over the past 250,000 years especially, taigas have become much denser than in previous ages, resulting in a sharp decline in the populations of understory plants like spine-stalks. Today, only the most shade-tolerant species are extant, with the rest of the group having died out as the pseudoforest floor gradually received less and less life-giving sunlight.
Palm-grasses contain Apterra's greatest diversity of pseudotrees, a position they've held for more than 2 million years. There are currently over two dozen genera in the Pseudodendroid subfamily, from canopy-palms to sand-palms to basal mycads that never evolved to become full-on trees. Many have gone the way of the paddle-grass, such as the gorgeous Palm of Paradise, a rain-pseudoforest genus that failed to compete with other species as the tropical jungle was pushed into smaller and smaller pockets of warm equatorial lowlands. Others are at the height of their success; wax-palms, for example, have joined the basket-bush in the ranks of widespread taiga pseudotrees, though they prefer moister environments than their drought-tolerant counterparts. Producing a thick layer of dense, resin-like nectar, wax-palms recover quickly from injuries and provide a richer-than-average food source for their isopod colonies. Their smooth, evergreen foliage grants them the greatest tolerance to freezing temperatures of any pseudotree, and they can survive at latitudes inhospitable to any other vascular plant besides spiny-grasses.
Temperate pseudoforests boast the highest diversity of palm-grasses, as the group originated from a mid-latitude zone. Feather-palms tower over all other plants in the region, reaching 20 meters with ease. Canopy-palms, while only around half this height, make up a larger percentage of floral biomass overall, forming a roof of leaves and branches above the understory. Below them, palm-brush forms dense thickets alongside ratbriars, making some patches of pseudoforest floor impassible to large animals like ratjackals and kiwizelles. Palm-brush colonies can be extensive, growing outward at a rate of about a meter per year. While few individual stems last for even half a decade, the underground root system persists, allowing ancient, sprawling networks to remain unified for centuries. They'll keep expanding until these subterranean connections are destroyed by disease, herbivores, or environmental damage. At that point, the many genetically-identical fragments, no longer able to chemically communicate with one another, begin to compete amongst themselves, choking each other out until only a small fraction of the original colony remains, by which time new individuals will have sprouted, usually managing to outcompete their ailing elders.
In the tropics, basal mycads are more prevalent. These can reach similar heights to the wax-palm, and their large, pinnate (or sometimes even bipinnate) leaves overlap to create a canopy so dense that little light reaches the ground. This means that, unlike the productive plant communities that take advantage of the dappled light in temperate regions, there is little underbrush here, with all species fighting to reach the light above. The ferocity of this struggle is only bound to increase as time goes on, with ever-shrinking pockets of rain-pseudoforest failing to support their former diversity. While there will be many losers among all sorts of tropical flora, the future beyond the ice age is certain to provide opportunities for weird and derived grasses - including new radiations of pseudotrees - to diversify even further.