What kinds of plants would disappear in the event of a mass environmental apocalypse? If there was radiation leakage, would the plants die, or thrive in the lack of human disturbance to them? Basically how do you think the world itself would react to an apocalypse caused by disasters?
I don't know a whole lot about radiation leakages, but I do know that Chernobyl still has a lot of vegetation. Because there aren't a lot of humans around, plants can pretty much grow where they want, but a lot of plants have mutated in some way. I don't know about plants dying. I imagine that there's some info out there about what happened to the plants in Chernobyl??
It depends, really. If the radiation was bad enough it would probably poison the soil and kill the plants initially. However, plants adapt (not the same as evolve) extremely fast so it is likely that they would bounce back, maybe with some sort of mutation. Research the idea of ecological succession, this will help give you an idea of how plant communities return after a disaster, either natural or man-made.
There's some really amazing photos of mutated dandelions from Chernobyl, and the pine trees there have adapted to resist radiation. A Gingko tree survived standing less than a mile from the epicenter of the Hiroshima detonation. If we're talking an environmental disaster like extreme desertification, then succulents like agave would hang on, and for variety you could look up drought-hardy plants like bougainvillea, moss-rose, oleander, and sage.
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