flora
noun
Flora — the plant life that belongs, distinctly, to a single place
Definition
(botany) a living organism lacking the power of locomotion
In depth
Flora names the plant life characteristic of a particular region, era, or environment, the botanical counterpart to fauna, allowing an entire landscape's vegetation to be gathered under a single collective term. The word implies belonging: flora is always the flora of somewhere, native to a soil and climate that shaped it.
Origin
Like fauna, the word borrows the name of a Roman deity, Flora, goddess of flowers and the season of spring, honored each year in the festival of the Floralia. Linnaeus again fixed the term in scientific use during the eighteenth century, pairing goddess with goddess to give botany and zoology matching, mythologically rooted vocabularies.
Usage examples
"The expedition's botanist pressed and catalogued specimens of the valley's flora for three months without exhausting its variety."
"Invasive species had quietly displaced much of the island's original flora long before anyone thought to document the loss."
"She kept a small garden meant to recreate, in miniature, the flora of her grandmother's homeland."
How to use it
Flora belongs to botanical, ecological, and travel writing, almost always invoked alongside or in implicit contrast to fauna. It lends a region's plant life a sense of coherence and identity that the plural 'plants' alone does not convey.
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