Your window to the world of Chilean Plants...
Your Seeds Source...
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Your window to the world of Chilean Plants...
Your Seeds Source...
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The Key Points...
ChileFlora.com is your window to the world of the native Chilean plants and to their seeds. It provides you with the opportunity to learn about the Chilean plants, their nutritional and medicinal properties, identify them, and to purchase seeds.
Here you will find articles about the Chilean flora. Additionally, we present several galleries of images of the Chilean landscapes, in the belief that in order to understand fully the world of the Chilean plants you have to get a feeling for the environment in which they live. In the same section you will soon find descriptions of the different habitats in Chile.
The heart of our page is a database and on-line herbarium of live plants with the descriptions, uses, growing tips, and photos of many native Chilean plants - currently we present more than 2202 species with over 20353 photos, and soon we will make available much more from our internal data base with over 31000 photos and 2200 species! This is a long-term project and we hope eventually to cover most species of the Chilean flora (about 5000 species). You can also browse our database by means of Text Indexes.
Finally, we sell 700 species of Chilean native plants in our Seeds Shop.
Bookmark UsOur Philosophy of the Andes...
The Tools We Use and some Off-road fun...
Last year it has rained and rained in the northern parts of Chile, so that the desert had to wake up for a couple of months and show all its beauty...
See a film about the Blooming Chilean Desert
(High Resolution, 16 MB)
For the time being without sound.
Chileflora.com is 100 % private project and it is not financed by any entity, Chilean or foreign.
We are looking for strategic partners who may help us with our work and make the dream of a complete on-line virtual herbarium come true and develop other projects related to Chilean flora, both in the realm of publication/web and more down-to-earth projects (in the very concrete sense): formation of a botanical garden.
Therefore we are looking for entities who may be interested in developing projects of this nature together or sponsors who may provide financing for these projects...
The Key Points...
Photograph of Mulinum spinosum
See full record of this plant...
Buy seeds of similar plants...
During more than one week I have visited Chilean extreme north on the border with Peru and Bolivia (I and XV Region, Putre, Parinacota, Lago Chungara, Socoromo, Zapahuira, Chapiquiña, Colchane, Chusmiza, Mamiña, Iquique) and collected (photographically) more than 150 species, including some plants from as high as 4800 m.!
You can now watch these species on our site. Select "1 Region" in the database to obtain a list of all species from that area. According to the last count, 150 species were added. Some species are not yet fully identified, and it will take us a few weeks to do so. We have now over 2200 species in our database!
Soon several articles on the botanical trip to this area will be uploaded!
We have expanded our germination manual, by including instructions for Puya, Mutisia, Jubae, Araucaria, Calceolaria, Haplopappus, and Chiliotrichum. Check them out here.
A new functionality was added to our system. Now you can formulate queries to obtain lists of species. This feature can be used for identifying plants (you enter the characteristics which you know, and the system will give you a list of all species which comply with them, and then you would only have to browse through the list to visually confirm the identification).
The other use of this feature is that it allows you to generate lists of species which have some special characteristics. For instance, you want to know which plants live in Mediterranean climate in Chile... Then select the regions 4 through 8 (outside this range the rainfall does not correspond to Mediterranean climate) and altitudes: coastal, coastal mountains, low elevation, medium elevation (higher elevation have a colder climate), and you got the corresponding list of species...
The query formulator is quite versatile, as it allows to both include and exclude certain features within a given variable group, it allows numerical values for some variables (like height of the plant), it allows partial text searches within Latin Name, Family Name, Spanish Name, English Name, and it has several logical operators to be applied between the variable groups, like "AND," "OR," "NOT." This means that you can formulate flexible queries.
The graphic interface makes the formulation of the query rather easy and intuitive, and for simple queries one would not have to change any of default settings (logical operators between blocks, for instance).
Read more about the features of this new tool.
Read more about the variables which are used in our data base.
We have just collected a few remaining fruits with seeds of Calceolaria cana. The supply is very limited, about 8 packets! Next time we expect these seeds to be harvested is around January 2010.
Also, very fresh seeds of Luzuriaga radicans, Anemone moorei, Luma apiculata have come in! During this week and next week we can send them semi-dry, which will hugely increase their germination rate!
During the last few days I have been checking our internal data base and identifying more new species, as a result of which about 100 new species were added to our site.
Now we have 2004 species! This represents about 40% of all Chilean species.
Here you can visit our updated data base!.
During the next two months we are going to add more species and also correct some identification errors. I estimate that we have about 150 more specimen to identify, which are going to be uploaded during June and July.
If you believe that there is an identification mistake with any of our records or if you know the identification of a plant which appears as no name, you can post your observations on our forum.
We are carrying right now a contest for best article "Let Us Protect Our Chilean Native Flora." This competition is carried out in Spanish and is open only for the Chileans.
The objective of this competition is to write an article on any subject related to problems affecting the Chilean flora and to instigate people to take active part in the task of protecting the flora.
The closing date is set for the end of July 2009, and the results will be published in September 2009. To make things more transparent, the judges are from University of Talca and Conama, and we do not participate directly in evaluation of the articles.
There are several prizes both in cash (170 USD) and seeds (500 USD).
This is our first intent in carrying out such an initiative, and if it goes well, i. e. if there will be enough interest by the Chileans to participate, we plan to carry out this contest every year.
A random photo of Chilean Landscape
The Battle of Elements