Species Plantarum

Species Plantarum, (1753), two-volume work by the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus, in which he established a precise and workable two-word, or binomial, system for naming plants. This system forms the basis of modern plant taxonomy. In this master work Linnaeus described 6,000 species of plants and assigned each plant a genus name and a species name, the genus representing a group of plants, the species designating specific individuals within a given genus.

Species Plantarum was the first work that consistently applied a referable system of nomenclature; it was a vast improvement over the cumbersome polynomial descriptions generally used before its publication. The first edition of Species Plantarum (with the 1754 edition of an earlier work, Genera Plantarum) has been internationally accepted as the starting point in the nomenclature of flowering plants and ferns.