INTRODUCTION 
This manual supplants, in part, the Flora of the Southeastern United 
States published by the author in 1903 (seeond edition 1913). at 
volume reeorded and deseribed the flowering plants and pteridophyta? 
known at that time to grow naturally in the southern United States east 
of the one hundredth meridian of longitude. The complexity and magni- 
tude of the flora in this area, resulting from its proximity to the tropies, 
the intrusion of the northern highlands, and the extension of the Great 
Plains and the deserts from the west, made it seem desirable to divide the 
“Flora” into two parts. The result is the present volume and a proposed 
volume to inelude the area west of the Mississippi River south of the same 
degree of latitude and east of the western boundary of Texas. Thus 
smaller volumes will result, and plants may be traced by the analytieal 
keys with greater ease, since fewer genera and species are usually involved. 
he geographic area concerned represents one of the cradles of bot 
on the American mainland, for on the coasts of the Gulf States mi 
Spanish expeditioners were necessarily, not by choice, brought into close 
contact with the native vegetation. They left us printed records of the 
uses made of various plants by the aborigines and by themselves for foods, 
drinks, medicines, clothing, utensils, and fumitories. Their interest was 
not wholly utilitarian, for some plants so impressed them, the cacti for 
example, that they took them back to Europe and grew them ther 
out a eentury after the discovery of America by esas living 
specimens of plants from the Atlantic coast began to find their way into 
European botanic gardens. Explorations by plant collectors were soon 
extended into the highlands and into the Florida peninsula. Later, col- 
lectors were sent over from Europe and Pa were commissioned by 
European patrons of botany to explore for plan American residents 
about this time began to publish the results of m studies. Today t 
works on the flora are numerous. 
The first American botanical pum in the northeast developed near 
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the middle part of the eighteenth century, 
as a result of the plant-eolleeting activities of John Bartram. Here many 
of the plants. of the southeast were cultivated. In thé second half of that 
century the first botanieal garden in the southeast grew about the home of 
Thomas Walter on the Santee River north of Charleston, South Carolina. 
Walter’s association with this native flora crystallized into the first manual 
of the plants of a more or less definite geographic area, under the title 
Flora Caroliniana, in 1788. Interest in the native plants and in botany 
inereased and reached a eulmination about the middle of the last eentury, 
3 The pteridophyta are omitted from the present work. 
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