page_title: Table Mountain National Park
section_title: Flora
hierarchical_section_title: Table Mountain National Park / Flora
caption_attribution_description: English: Commercial pine plantations at Newlands Forest. Cape Town.
context_page_description: Table Mountain National Park, previously known as the Cape Peninsula National Park, is a national park in Cape Town, South Africa, proclaimed on 29 May 1998, for the purpose of protecting the natural environment of the Table Mountain Chain, and in particular the rare fynbos vegetation. The park is managed by South African National Parks. The property is included as part of the UNESCO Cape Floral Region World Heritage Site.
  The park contains two well-known landmarks: Table Mountain, for which the park is named; and the Cape of Good Hope, the most southwestern extremity of Africa.
context_section_description: This area forms part of the Cape Floristic Region and as such supports a high diversity of flora, much of which is rare and endemic. Protea, erica, restio and Asteraceae species, as well as geophytes, are all found in abundance. The main indigenous vegetation types are Peninsula Sandstone Fynbos and Cape Granite Fynbos, both of which are endangered and endemic to Cape Town - occurring nowhere else in the world.
  In addition, some sections of the park are the natural home of deep, indigenous Afro-temperate forests.
  A well known local tree is the Silver tree (Leucadendron argenteum), a popularly cultivated species which is found in the wild only on the slopes of Lion's Head and a few scattered locations elsewhere on the Cape Peninsula (a notable area is above Kirstenbosch).
  The Park lies in the heart of the Cape Floral Kingdom, which is a bio-diversity hot spot and seen by botanists as a botanical anomaly. In fact, there are more species of plant in Table Mountain National Park (over two thousand) than exist in the whole of the United Kingdom. 
  Much of the unique flora in the area surrounding the park has been lost to agriculture and urban development.
  Indigenous plants are being increasingly harvested for traditional medicines, an activity some regard as a form of poaching. Such produce can be found on sale as remedies on the streets of Cape Town's central business district. Indigenous species are also threatened by invasive plants such as Acacia cyclops, three Hakea species, and invasive pines that were planted in commercial timber plantations on the slopes of the mountain also . Today the Table Mountain range has the highest concentration of threatened species of any continental area of equivalent size in the world.
caption: Commercial plantation of invasive European Pinus pinaster or "Cluster Pine", on Table Mountain's eastern slopes
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