Plant naming goes back as far as our earliest ancestors, but it was the Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus, who was the first to put the science of taxonomy on a proper systematic footing in 1753. As Linnaeus pointed out, “If you do not know the names of things, the knowledge of them is lost too”. Each year some 2,000 new plant species are named for the first time. The scene of these discoveries can be in the underexplored mountains and forests of the world, but equally they can take place in the great herbaria and museums of the world, where new species may have been collected over a hundred years ago, but are still coming to light. Within the National Herbarium our researchers continue to describe new species and revise our understanding of the plant world