Vegetation is a general term for the plant life of a region; it refers to the ground cover provided by plants. It is a general term, without specific reference to particular taxa, life forms, structure, spatial extent, or any other specific botanical or geographic characteristics. It is broader than the term flora which refers exclusively to species composition. Perhaps the closest synonym is plant community, but vegetation can, and often does, refer to a wider range of spatial scales than that term does, including scales as large as the global. Primeval redwood forests, coastal mangrove stands, sphagnum bogs, desert soil crusts, roadside weed patches, wheat fields, cultivated gardens and lawns; all are encompassed by the term vegetation.

Much of the work on vegetation classification comes from European and North American ecologists, and they have fundamentally different approaches. In North America, vegetation types are based on a combination of the following criteria: climate pattern, plant habit, phenology and/or growth form, and dominant species. In the current US standard (adopted by the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC), and originally developed by UNESCO and The Nature Conservancy), the classification is hierarchical and incorporates the non-floristic criteria into the upper (most general) five levels and limited floristic criteria only into the lower (most specific) two levels. In Europe, classification often relies much more heavily, sometimes entirely, on floristic (species) composition alone, without explicit reference to climate, phenology or growth forms. It often emphasizes indicator or diagnostic species which separate one type from another.

Julian Cope (born Julian David Cope on 21 October 1957) is a British rock musician, author, antiquary, musicologist, poet and cultural commentator. Originally coming to prominence in 1978 as the singer and songwriter in Liverpool post-punk band The Teardrop Explodes, he has followed a solo career since 1983 and worked on musical side projects such as Queen Elizabeth, Brain Donor and Black Sheep.

Cope is also a recognised authority on Neolithic culture, an outspoken political and cultural activist with a noted and public interest in occultism and paganism. As an author and commentator, he has written two successive volumes of autobiography called Head-On (1994) and Repossessed (1999), two volumes of archaeology called The Modern Antiquarian (1998) and The Megalithic European (2004) and two volumes of musicology called Krautrocksampler (1995) and Japrocksampler (2007).

Born in Deri, Mid Glamorgan, Julian Cope spent his early life in Wales. Part of his childhood was spent in the Welsh town of Bargoed, adjacent to Aberfan, and he has cited the Aberfan disaster of 1966 as a key event of his childhood. Cope’s family later moved to Tamworth, Staffordshire, where he spent his adolescence. He attended City of Liverpool College of Higher Education, and it was here that he first became involved in music.