Plants of the World: Every Plant is Native Somewhere

California poppy
in California grasslands

Tortuguero National Park
Costa Rica

      Every plant is native somewhere! That is a truth that eventually strikes the traveler. For me, it was seeing plants I knew as houseplants  growing up a tree in the rainforest of Costa Rica.  

    Whether the plant is grown as a house plant or raised for its fruit or planted as a shrub to brighten the yard, it has a home range somewhere where it can be found growing naturally. 

     (There are a few domesticated plants whose the wild relative has gone extinct, but those are exceptional cases and today I want to talk about the vast majority of the world's 330,000 species of plants.) 

     Where plants are native they don't need human help to grow and reproduce. There, they can be found growing in odd locations--along a fence, on an eroding slope--because they got there by themselves. 

    Do you know the homelands of the plants around you?