Shrubs

The shrub was an unused variant of short grass that did not generate naturally. In Bedrock Edition, it used the name fern and took the appearance of short grass. they are now considered a collectible.

History

Shrubs were introduced to the game in Java Edition Beta 1.6, likely in May 2011. Shrubs look almost identical to dead bushes, be it that they are sunk into the ground one pixel lower and don’t align perfectly to the blocks they are on, but are ‘randomly’ placed just like flowers and grass. Interestingly, shrubs shared the same item ID (#0031/0) with tall grass (#0031/1). On top of that they could not be placed on sand like dead bushes, but only on grass. Shrubs were not obtainable in survival or creative mode. The only confirmed way to obtain them was through commands, meaning that either the admin or someone with backdoor access brought them into the server. Allegedly the player 4Pilot originally found these shrubs in old terrain and picked them up using shears. Shrubs were not considered very rare, since they had been duplicated a lot. When the server updated to Java Edition 1.19.4 shrubs were removed from the game and turned into dead bushes. Shrubs that were already placed down on grass remained in existence, turning them into a relic of the past and a collectible.