You don't always notice the plants first.
You notice the road, a village, the hills or perhaps the river, but look around you and they are everywhere.
Trees line the roads and village streets, orchards grow behind houses, reeds stand beside lakes and rivers and wildflowers appear along paths, between fields and sometimes in places where nobody seems to have planted anything at all.
In spring and summer, the colours change quickly.
A roadside that looked almost empty a few weeks ago can suddenly be covered with flowers and the trees give structure.
Wild plants fill the spaces between.
Some have been standing for generations, while others get a few weeks in the sunshine before disappearing again until next year.
There will inevitably be one beautiful flower you photograph because you want to know what it is, but then you forget to find out. ;-)
That they are not just part of the background but they are part of the experience.
Moldova's plant life changes considerably across the country.
There are oak and other broadleaf forests in the Codrii, steppe vegetation and-
grasslands, wetlands along the Prut and Dniester, and plants growing around the
lakes, riverbanks and limestone areas.
Then there is the vegetation people have shaped by themselves over many years - vineyards, orchards, gardens and trees planted along roads and around villages.
This section doesn't try to catalogue everything growing in Moldova but instead, it is a
starting point.
From here you can explore trees, wildflowers, water plants and other parts of Moldova's vegetation in more detail.
And when you're travelling through Moldova, look beside the road occasionally and you will see some of the country's smallest inhabitants are growing there.
