Flora ( pl. : floras or florae ) is all the plant life present in a particular region or time, generally the naturally occurring ( indigenous ) native plants. The corresponding term for animals is fauna , and for fungi , it is funga . Sometimes bacteria and fungi are also referred to as flora as in the terms gut flora or skin flora .
6-514: Flora Capensis is a book that described the flora found in colonial South Africa, encompassing the Cape Colony , Kaffraria and the Colony of Natal , as it was known during the second half of the 19th century. Creating the book was suggested by the famous English botanist Sir William Jackson Hooker . William Henry Harvey and Otto Wilhelm Sonder took up the work of writing the first three volumes of
12-504: A historic era as in fossil flora . Lastly, floras may be subdivided by special environments: The flora of a particular area or time period can be documented in a publication also known as a " flora " (often capitalized as "Flora" to distinguish the two meanings when they might be confused). Floras may require specialist botanical knowledge to use with any effectiveness. Traditionally they are books , but some are now published on CD-ROM or websites . Simon Paulli 's Flora Danica of 1648
18-599: Is probably the first book titled "Flora" to refer to the plant world of a certain region. It mainly describes medicinal plants growing in Denmark. The Flora Sinensis by the Polish Jesuit Michał Boym is another early example of a book titled "Flora". However, despite its title it covered not only plants but also some animals of the region, that is China and India. A published flora often contains diagnostic keys. Often these are dichotomous keys , which require
24-582: The Flora Capensis , which were published between 1860 and 1865 by Hodges, Smith and Co. in Dublin, and A.S. Robertson in Cape Town. Parts 4 to 6 were edited by William Turner Thiselton-Dyer and issued over the following decades, with the supplement published in 1933. This article about a book on botany or plants is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Flora The word "flora" comes from
30-499: The Latin name of Flora , the goddess of plants , flowers , and fertility in Roman mythology . The technical term "flora" is then derived from a metonymy of this goddess at the end of the sixteenth century. It was first used in poetry to denote the natural vegetation of an area, but soon also assumed the meaning of a work cataloguing such vegetation. Moreover, "Flora" was used to refer to
36-503: The flowers of an artificial garden in the seventeenth century. The distinction between vegetation (the general appearance of a community) and flora (the taxonomic composition of a community) was first made by Jules Thurmann (1849). Prior to this, the two terms were used interchangeably. Plants are grouped into floras based on region ( floristic regions ), period, special environment, or climate. Regions can be distinct habitats like mountain vs. flatland. Floras can mean plant life of
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