May 1, 1753

Species Plantarum

Assigned starting date for Linnaeus's Species Plantarum

The birthday of botanical priority is partly a legal fiction. The second volume did not appear until August.

An assigned date, not a release day

1 May 1753 is the bibliographically established and nomenclaturally assigned publication date for both volumes of Linnaeus's Species Plantarum. The nomenclatural Code records that the volumes actually appeared in May and August, but treats both as published simultaneously on 1 May.

The Hunt Institute calls that an arbitrarily fixed date. It is a convention for settling priority, not a documented single release of the complete work.

What the two volumes contained

Issued in Stockholm at the expense of the publisher Lars Salvius, the work organized recognized plants by genera under Linnaeus's sexual system, arranged across 24 classes. The two volumes run to 1,200 numbered pages plus preliminaries and 32 final pages, carrying 5,940 transcribed binomial entries.

The book consistently paired a generic name with a one-word trivial name across the plant species it covered. Linnaeus did not invent the idea of two-word names here; the significance is the comprehensive and consistent application.

A key, not a tree

The sexual system was a practical artificial key based on reproductive structures. It made no claim about common ancestry, and the work is a nomenclatural starting point for names at particular ranks and groups rather than the beginning of plant classification.

Some North American names rested on pressed plants collected by John Clayton in Virginia and examined by Linnaeus through European correspondents.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 8 sources 2 audit passes Traditional date

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

Traditional date. This date is the conventional one, not one fixed by a contemporary record.

What the sources leave uncertain

1 May is principally a conventional or assigned date, not a securely documented single release day for the complete work.
The Hunt Institute calls 1 May an arbitrarily fixed date for both volumes; the Code states that the volumes actually appeared in May and August 1753.
The current governing rules are called the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants, not the former International Code of Botanical Nomenclature.