Which plants are included in the key?
Allium triquetrum
The key is to flowering plant genera that are wild and casual in New Zealand. New Zealand is the New Zealand Botanical Region and includes offshore and outlying islands -- the Kermadec Islands, the Chatham Islands, and New Zealand's southern outlying islands.
Wild genera are those which are native and naturalised. Native genera are those that were present before human arrival but also those have arrived recently but not by human agency (new colonisers or vagrants). Naturalised genera, called 'fully naturalised' in the key, have self-sustaining populations in the wild. Casual genera are those that are known only from cultivated areas such as gardens, where they are producing young plants from seed or by suckering, or are known from single wild sites, often from sites with dumped garden refuse, or abandoned gardens. In reality, the line between the casual and fully naturalised state is not a sharply defined one. The key does not include genera that present in New Zealand only in cultivation and not known to be reproducing themselves.
The key includes all genera wild or casual in Nga Tipu o Aotearoa (Allan Herbarium, 2000), and in almost all cases agrees with that database on the biostatus (native, fully naturalised, or casual), but in a few cases, we have scored what Nga Tipu o Aoteoroa regards as casual as fully naturalised because of interpretation of data associated with recently collected specimens.