page_title: Species Plantarum
section_title: Importance
hierarchical_section_title: Species Plantarum / Importance
caption_attribution_description: Eesti: Keskmise teelehe (Plantago media) õisikEnglish: Flowering Plantago media, natural habitat in northwestern part of Keila (Estonia)
context_page_description: Species Plantarum is a book by Carl Linnaeus, originally published in 1753, which lists every species of plant known at the time, classified into genera. It is the first work to consistently apply binomial names and was the starting point for the naming of plants.
context_section_description: Species Plantarum was the first botanical work to consistently apply the binomial nomenclature system of naming to any large group of organisms (Linnaeus' tenth edition of Systema Naturae would apply the same technique to animals for the first time in 1758). Prior to this work, a plant species would be known by a long polynomial, such as Plantago foliis ovato-lanceolatis pubescentibus, spica cylindrica, scapo tereti (meaning "plantain with pubescent ovate-lanceolate leaves, a cylindrical spike and a terete scape") or Nepeta floribus interrupte spicatis pedunculatis (meaning "Nepeta with flowers in a stalked, interrupted spike"). In Species Plantarum, these cumbersome names were replaced with two-part names, consisting of a single-word genus name, and a single-word specific epithet or "trivial name"; the two examples above became Plantago media and Nepeta cataria, respectively. The use of binomial names had originally been developed as a kind of shorthand in a student project about the plants eaten by cattle.
  After the specific epithet, Linnaeus gave a short description of each species, and a synonymy. The descriptions were careful and terse, consisting of few words in small genera; in Glycyrrhiza, for instance, the three species (Glycyrrhiza echinata, Glycyrrhiza glabra and "Glycyrrhiza hirsuta", respectively) were described as "leguminibus echinatis", "leguminibus glabris" and "leguminibus hirsutis".
  Because it is the first work in which binomial nomenclature was consistently applied, Species Plantarum was chosen as the "starting point" for the nomenclature of most plants (the nomenclature of some non-vascular plants and all fungi uses later starting points).
caption: Before Species Plantarum, this plant was referred to as "Plantago foliis ovato-lanceolatis pubescentibus, spica cylindrica, scapo tereti"; Linnaeus renamed it Plantago media.
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