Celebrating Wildflowers T he national forests, national parks, national wildlife refuges, grasslands, and millions of acres of public lands are truly America's wildflower gardens. Many events feature the important role that the Nations public lands, over 630 million acres, play in providing diverse habitats for much of America's flora. Or visit the Celebrating Wildflowers web site hosted by the National Park Service. Importance of Plants and Plant Communities Plants and plant communities are critically important to humans and their environment.
Plants have great aesthetic value.
Native plants provide spiritual link with nature and our Nation's diverse cultural history. Throughout history plants have been of paramount importance to medicine. Forty to 50 percent of all medicinal drugs originate in wild plants. In fact 25 percent of all prescriptions written annually in the United States contain chemicals from plants. In spite of the technological and medical advances, only 2 percent of the world's plant species have been analyzed even for one group of plant chemicals, the alkaloids.