WILD FLOWER

also spelled Wildflower, any flowering plant growing without intentional human aid. Wild flowers are the source of all cultivated garden varieties of flowers. Although most wild flowers are native to the region in which they occur, some are the descendants of flowering plants introduced from other lands. The bright flowers characteristic of the Hawaiian Islands, for example, are nearly all native to other parts of the tropics and subtropics. Most were taken purposely to the islands for cultivation but spread rapidly into the fertile lowlands, displacing the less-colourful native species and leaving only the steep mountainsides to the original flora. In the lowlands of the United States and Europe most wild flower species are native; others are migrants. Disturbance of the native flora by humans began in prehistoric times. For example, fires that escaped from the control of their human makers are thought to have burned off native vegetation and made way for aggressive species from the same or other areas. For instance, one of the best-known buttercups of northern Europe, Ranunculus acris, probably became more abundant and widespread as the forests were burned away. In the lowlands of northern Europe, this species probably became modified during the Stone Age into some new forms better adapted to habitats created by human actions. Two forms occurring in the northern United States and Canada, which had been introduced into eastern North America by the early 19th century, gradually spread across the continent, one becoming common in the state of Washington only within the 20th century. The distinction of weeds from wild flowers depends upon the purpose of the classification. A weed is a plant that, from a human perspective, is out of place; that is, one growing where it is unwanted. Sunflowers are looked upon as weeds when growing in cultivated fields or on grazing land of the Great Plains of North America but as wild flowers in uncultivated valleys. The sunflower also is a crop plant cultivated for its seeds; in some places it is a garden flower. There may be as many as 250,000 species of flowering plants, thousands of which are wild flowers. Relatively few occurring on one continent may be found on another, and individual parts of the same continent may have almost wholly different floras, for wild flowers and other plants are affected by many factors, especially moisture and temperature. Moisture variation may be extreme on the opposite sides of the same mountain range. Temperature changes due to altitude or latitude are marked by corresponding variations in flora. Over long distances from north to south, even in such level areas as the plains that stretch between Saskatchewan and Texas, there is almost a complete change with latitude in wild flowers as well as other plants. Many tropical and subtropical species are limited in northward distribution by the occurrence of any frost. The distribution of wild flowers and other plants is segregated roughly into those of the tropics and subtropics, the horse latitudes (at about latitude 30 north and south) of both hemispheres, the temperate regions of both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, and the Arctic and Antarctic and the summits of mountain chains ranging to the southward. Some wilderness areas and their native flora have been preserved in national, state or provincial, and local parks and monuments, particularly in the United States and Canada, but in general the once vast areas of wild flowers have not been preserved. These tracts of land were most vulnerable to human destruction because they were easily converted to cropland, grazing land, or settlements.