the.com/vegetation
The planet's quiet rebellion against being bare rock.
means Plant life collectively — the trees, shrubs, grasses, and everything green covering an area of land.
from From Latin vegetare, 'to enliven, animate, quicken' — itself from vegetus, 'lively, vigorous,' rooted in vegere, 'to be active.' For centuries 'vegetation' in English carried that sense of animation, even of spiritual quickening. The narrowing to mean 'plants in general' happened as botanists co-opted the word for the visible, growing evidence of that life-force in the natural world — so ironically, the word for 'inert plant cover' started out meaning the opposite: vital energy itself.
- older meaning
- once meant any act of growth or vigor
- irony
- root word means lively, now implies motionless
- vegetate's cousin
- same root gave us the insult for doing nothing
- scale
- describes everything from moss to rainforests