GroundworkAn account of North American flora by common understanding refers to known American plants, native and otherwise, drawing on recorded or remembered information about American plants in addition to their names or locations. Truly comprehensive information about American flora (or the people who have studied it, or lived knowledgably with it in local settings) does not exist; the subject is too vast. That said, American plants are fascinating in their regional and local variety, their histories, their uses and meanings, their names, and the many ways they have always (and for the most part by necessity) captured the attention of people -the same factors that make a comprehensive understanding of American plants elusive.The most ambitious botanical survey to date, comprising botanical information on some 20,000 identified North American species collected over the last 500 years, offers an occasion to consider the difficulty of understanding American flora. The Flora of North America North of Mexico project (FNA 1993-; FNA 2008) is a collaborative effort among hundreds of plant specialists that began in the 1960s, and fewer than half of its thirty projected volumes are complete. It includes native and introduced species as well as extinct species. It explicitly excludes Mexico. Brief information on indigenous expertise comes from ethnobotanical records, which are also not comprehensive, and can't ever be: many American tribes and their languages no longer exist, as a direct result of the same 500 years that gave us American botany. The Flora of North America North of Mexico's first volume has excellent introductory essays on the history of plant collections and botanical books, weeds, indigenous relationships with plants, and conservation of plants, but the flora itself is foremost a list of plants organized taxonomically. Still, the editors are aware that people's interest in plants is
A Companion to American Environmental HistoryEdited by Douglas Cazaux Sackman