There is no difference :-) 'Bush' is just a term non-gardeners tend to apply to a shrub.......it is not a commonly accepted botanical or horticultural term.

Correctly, 'bush' is used to describe a thicket of shrubs or shrubby trees, generally all of the same type, rather than a individual plant.

Hi, gardengal48,

Thanks for your reply. I get it now!

It seems Wikipedia equates these two terms. And it also seems that there's a couple of divergences of the definition for these two words in difference regions of the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrub

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1116370

;-) ;-) ;-)

Isn't a bush also a type of ex-president? ;-)

In UK English, there's no difference between the two.

Resin

Hi,pineresin,

:-) :-) Thanks for your help.

Nice day!

maplec, botanically speaking, I daresay, shrub seeks to define plants of a particular size while bush or bushy seems to describe the way a plant grows. I have seen the terms "short bushy tree" used to describe Podocarpus and mangrove. Long ago and faraway, I remember a British botanist lamenting the fact that the term "bush" was used colloquially to mean a mature rain forest.

ronalawn82, thank you for your kind suggestion! Thanks! :-D

A shrub is a cultivated bush.

My plant name is called OLIVA here in the Philippines. Its leaves are turning to yellow. A healthy OLIVA leaves are green. Please help.

1. Oliva is a genus of gastropod mollusc in the family Olividae. Not sure what type of plant would be called that.

2. Your post is in the wrong place! This is a discussion about the comparison of the words bush and shrub.

3. For help with your plants, you need to properly identify the plant and then start a new thread in the appropriate forum.

I am not a botanist but a hobbyist gardener. Here is my understanding. Let us write it in sequence: shrub, bush and tree.
Bush is only a form of growth, multi-trunk from the ground up.
A tree is a single trunk (or a few trunks) from the ground but can diverge into branches above.
A tree can be cut to the ground, like fig, and it will tend to grow like a bush if all suckers and new shoots are allowed to grow, and it is called fig bush and not called a shrub. It can be made into a tree if all suckers and shoots are removed leaving one of the trunks to grow.
Shrub by nature of the shrubby type plants are always in the form of bushes and do not (usually) take the form of trees. Shrubs may be upright like a bush or ground-hugging. Because of the form, the term bush can be used for an upright shrub the same way a fig tree grown from suckers is called a fig bush. Ground hugging shrubs are seldom called bushes.
But that is only my understanding..!

I believe it is just a mater of semantics and how the person defining the plant perceives it at the given time it is observed. Get out a dictionary and check this out! Geez!