A guide to the Linnaean species occurring in Western Australia

Carl Linnaeus was born 300 years ago in a small village in Småland, Råshult, Sweden. The Linnaeus Tercentenary will be celebrated with many events around the world, acknowledging the ground-breaking taxonomic foundations he laid for the natural sciences.

In 1707, Australia was barely known to the world and only from sporadic visits to the west coast by the Dutch and English. Its first strange plants had been collected only eight years earlier by the English buccaneer William Dampier. Did Linnaeus ever see these specimens? We may never know. But his legacy stretches even to this remote land, with 848 types of plants described by him growing here. This includes 230 taxa that are native to Western Australia.

As part of the Western Australian Herbarium's contribution to acknowledging the seminal work of Linnaeus, we present an overview of the cryptogamic and vascular plant species which occur in WA described by Linnaeus (or his son). The complete list is available here, or specific plant groups are documented and linked to in the following table. See also a list of the works of Carl Linnaeus, or related sources, available in the WA Herbarium Library.

Notes: Names are listed from the WA Herbarium's 'Census of Western Australian Plants' database as at 23 May 2007. The Angiosperms row in the above table is provided for comparative purposes and is a summation of the Dicot and Monocot rows (and therefore is not included in the totals given).

Compiled by Alex Chapman; last updated on 22 May 2007.

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