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Wandering through a tropical forest during the Carboniferous would have been an unearthly experience, with the curious visitor having to struggle through an array of primitive and bizarre plant forms.  However, despite the obvious differences between Carboniferous and modern vegetation, these ancient rainforests are arguably the best-understood plant ecosystem in the fossil record.  A brief summary will be given of the main plant groups that inhabited Carboniferous landscapes.  An overview of the life strategies and paleoecological preferences inferred for each group will be presented, and the challenges in reconstructing original plant fossil communities due to taphonomic processes will be discussed.  Finally, a macrofloral assemblage from Upper Carboniferous strata in western Newfoundland, first discovered in the late 1800s but only recently documented, will be given.  Plant fossils were recovered from meandering stream deposits that filled a deep paleovalley, and include the largest and most complete cordaitalean trees known.  Clastic swamps were dominated by soaring lycopsids, whereas the understory comprised various forms of vegetation.  Floodplains and channel-flanking levees were inhabited by seed ferns and sphenopsids that could endure repeated flooding and burial.  Forests of towering cordaitalean trees, reaching 50 m tall, occupied comparatively drier extrabasinal habitats surrounding the paleovalley.