A modern reference to temperate woody plants, including updated content from this site and much new material, can be found at Trees and Shrubs Online.

The Plant List

The Plant List is a working list of all known plant species. It aims to be comprehensive for species of Vascular plant (flowering plants, conifers, ferns and their allies) and of Bryophytes (mosses and liverworts).

Collaboration between the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and Missouri Botanical Garden enabled the creation of The Plant List by combining multiple checklist data sets held by these institutions and other collaborators.

Version 1.1 (September 2013) improved on the earlier version by including additional data sets, new versions of the original data sets and improved algorithms to resolve logical conflicts between those data sets.

The Plant List provides the Accepted Latin name for most species, with links to all Synonyms by which that species has been known. Around 20% of names are unresolved indicating that either the data sources included provided no evidence or view as to whether the name should be treated as accepted or not, or those data sets contained conflicting opinions that could not be readily resolved.

The Plant List is not perfect and represents work in progress. The aim remains to produce a ‘best effort’ list, to demonstrate progress and to stimulate further work. Important limitations are summarised here.