Plants

In botany, flora (plural: floras or florae) has two meanings. The first refers to the plant life occurring in that area, especially the naturally occurring plant life. The second refers to a work which briefly describes the species occurring in an area usually politically defined (in rare cases geographically defined), with the aim of allowing identification. A flora often contains a diagnostic key.

Plants are a major group of living things (about 300,000 species), including familiar organisms such as trees, flowers, herbs, and ferns. Aristotle divided all living things between plants, which generally do not move or have sensory organs, and animals. In Linnaeus' system, these became the Kingdoms Vegetabilia (later Plantae) and Animalia. Since then, it has become clear that the Plantae as originally defined included several unrelated groups, and the fungi and several groups of algae were removed to new kingdoms. However, these are still often considered plants in many contexts. Indeed, any attempt to match "plant" with a single taxon is doomed to fail, because plant is a vaguely defined concept unrelated to the presumed phylogenic concepts on which modern taxonomy is based.

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