Boise Idaho lies at the intersection of three major biogeographic provinces—the Northern Rocky Mountains, the Great Basin and the Columbia River Plateau.  Near this intersection lie extreme contrasts in climate (e.g. precipitation from 150 mm in Owyhee and Alvord Deserts to 2000 mm in Wallowa Mountains), topography (from 410 m at the bottom of Hell’s Canyon to 3850 m atop the highest alpine peak in Idaho, Mt. Borah), geology, and soils that lend diversity and complexity to Idaho floristics.  Idaho is home to roughly 3500 vascular plant taxa, over 3000 of which are native.  Within a 250 km radius of Boise lie many floristically different ecoregions, including the primarily rhyolitic Owyhee and Bruneau Plateaus dominated by a ‘sagebrush sea,’ but home to several endemic taxa; the largely volcanic ash-tuff Idaho/Oregon Graben (with more than 20 endemic taxa); the isolated Great Basin ranges of Steens Mountain and the Jarbidge Mountains, with several species widely disjunct from either Sierra Nevada or Rocky Mountain ranges;  the geologically complex Blue and Wallowa Mountains, home to yet other, often recently described endemics; mountains of the Idaho Batholith; east Central Idaho ranges still actively rising above the dry valley bottoms and home to 26 endemics; and the Snake River Plain—a mix of lava plains (with basaltic flows as recent as 2100 years ago), sagebrush steppe, and lacustrine and ash sediments deposited in Paleo Lake Idaho (10-1.5 MY ago).  While the story of floristics in SW Idaho and surroundings is still unfolding, this talk will highlight features of distribution, disjunction, rarity and endemism, ecology, and evolutionary patterns including reference to some of the larger genera including Lomatium, Eriogonum, and Astragalus.