Hundreds of plant species have gone extinct in recorded history, and the rate is accelerating. Current plant extinction is happening up to 350 times faster than the historical background rate, according to research published in Current Biology. Some of these lost species vanished thousands of years ago, others within living memory, and a few survive only because someone thought to collect seeds before it was too late.
Ancient Plants Lost to History
The most famous plant extinction may be silphium, a flowering species that grew in a narrow strip of North Africa and became one of the most valuable commodities in the ancient Mediterranean world. The Greeks and Romans used it for almost everything: its stalks were cooked as a vegetable, its roots eaten raw with vinegar, its dried sap grated as a spice, and its blooms distilled into perfume. Medicinally, it was prescribed for conditions ranging from toothaches to intestinal disorders. There is also strong evidence it was used as both an aphrodisiac and a contraceptive.
Silphium could not be cultivated. It grew only in the wild near the ancient city of Cyrene (in modern-day Libya), and heavy harvesting gradually wiped it out. The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century AD, noted that only a single stalk could be found in his lifetime. That final plant was harvested and sent to the emperor Nero as a curiosity. No living specimen has been found since.
Prehistoric Extinctions
Long before humans entered the picture, entire lineages of plants disappeared through natural climate shifts. Giant lycopods, tree-sized relatives of today’s tiny club mosses, dominated the tropical rainforests of the Carboniferous period. Two major genera, Lepidodendron and Sigillaria, formed vast swamp forests across what is now North America and Europe. These trees went extinct during the Permian period, roughly 250 million years ago, when sea levels dropped and the global climate shifted dramatically toward drier conditions. Their compressed remains became much of the coal we burn today.
Modern Extinctions With Known Dates
Modern plant extinctions are better documented, and the stories are often frustratingly preventable.
The St. Helena olive was a tree found only on the remote island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic. Portuguese explorers arrived in the early 1500s, and British settlers followed in the mid-1600s, clearing forest for farming. Feral goats devoured young shoots, preventing the tree from regenerating. By the twentieth century, only a handful remained. Conservation efforts kept the last individual alive for years, but at the end of 2003, it succumbed to a fungal infection. The species is now fully extinct.
Hawaii has been particularly devastated. The islands evolved in isolation for millions of years, producing thousands of species found nowhere else on Earth. Since human settlement, dozens of endemic plant species have been confirmed extinct with zero individuals remaining, including multiple species of ʻakoko (a native spurge) and several ferns and grasses unique to individual islands or atolls. Habitat destruction, invasive species, and grazing animals drove most of these losses.
Plants Extinct in the Wild but Surviving in Gardens
A handful of species exist in a strange limbo: gone from nature, alive only because humans grow them. At least seven vascular plant species in the continental United States and Canada fall into this category.
The most well-known is the Franklin tree (Franklinia alatamaha), a flowering tree native to Georgia. It has been extinct in the wild since 1803, and the cause remains unknown. The species survives today only because botanist John Bartram discovered it in 1765 and his son William collected seeds in 1773, bringing them back to the family garden in Philadelphia. Every Franklin tree alive today descends from those collected seeds. You can find them in botanical gardens and private collections across the eastern United States.
Other examples of plants extinct in the wild but kept alive through cultivation include Franciscan manzanita, originally from California, and at least two species of hawthorn from the Midwest and South. These species depend entirely on human care for their continued existence. If the gardens maintaining them closed or the plants were neglected, the species would vanish permanently.
Why Plants Go Extinct
The primary drivers are straightforward: habitat loss, deforestation, and land use change. When forests are converted to farmland or settlements, the plants that lived there simply have nowhere to go. Unlike animals, plants cannot relocate. A species restricted to a single valley or island is especially vulnerable because one development project or one invasive pest can eliminate every individual.
Climate change and pollution act as secondary drivers, often compounding the damage from habitat loss. Fires, pest outbreaks, and the spread of invasive plants, all of which intensify with warming temperatures, significantly raise extinction risk for species already under pressure. Research suggests that by mid-century, climate change may surpass deforestation as the leading threat to plant survival.
Island species face disproportionate risk. Plants that evolved on isolated islands like Hawaii or St. Helena often have no defenses against introduced herbivores like goats or pigs, and they occupy such small ranges that a single disease outbreak can be fatal to the entire species.
How Fast Plants Are Disappearing
The background extinction rate, meaning the natural pace at which species disappeared before human influence, is quite slow. Researchers at the University of California found that peak recent extinction rates for plants are 350 times higher than that historical norm. This makes the current era one of the most significant periods of plant loss in Earth’s history, comparable in speed (though not yet in scale) to the mass extinctions visible in the fossil record.
What makes plant extinction particularly concerning is that it often goes unnoticed. A mammal or bird extinction draws public attention, but a small fern vanishing from a Pacific atoll rarely does. Many plant species likely disappeared before scientists ever described them, meaning the true number of extinctions is almost certainly higher than official counts suggest.