eight of them are erect or spreading shrubs with one main stem. All of them have a conical or wide-conical common base of the flowers within one head. The base of lowest, fully fused part of the flower (called tube) is narrow and gets wider towards the upper end. Taxonomy The earliest known description from a species we now include in the genus Leucospermum was by Paul Hermann in Paradisus Batavus, a book describing the plants of the Hortus Botanicus Leiden (botanical garden of the Leyden University), that was published in 1689, three years after his death. He called it Salix conophora Africana (African cone-bearing willow), based on his observation of Leucospermum conocarpodendron on the lower slopes of the Table Mountain. In the following six decades, several other descriptions were published, such as by Leonard Plukenet, James Petiver, John Ray and Herman Boerhaave. Names published before 1753, the year that was chosen as a starting point for the binominal nomenclature proposed by Carl Linnaeus, are not valid however. The first valid names were already created that very year with the publication of the first edition of Species Plantarum, with the description of two species, Leucadendron conocarpodendron and Leucadendron hypophyllocarpodendron (now Leucospermum conocarpodendron and L. hypophyllocarpodendron) by Linnaeus. In 1763, Michel Adanson also described several Proteaceae species, and did so under the generic names Lepidocarpus and Conocarpus. Four more species were described, by Linnaeus (Protea pubera and P. totta in 1771, now L. calligerum and L. tottum), Peter Jonas Bergius (Leucadendron oleaefolium 1766, now Leucospermum oleifolium) and Nicolaas Laurens Burman (Leucadendron cuneiforme, now Leucospermum cuneiforme), before Carl Peter Thunberg in 1781 published a revision containing nine species now included in Leucospermum, including Protea heterophylla and P. tomentosa (now L. heterophyllum and L. tomentosum). Further species were added by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck: Protea vestita 1792 (now L. vestitum), Thunberg: P. prostrata in 1794 (now L. prostratum), Henry Cranke Andrews: Protea formosa 1798 (now L. formosum), and P. candicans in 1803 (now Leucospermum rodolentum) a later homonym of P. candicans Thunb. 1800 (now Paranomus candicans), and in The Paradisus Londinensis by botanical illustrator William Hooker and botanist Richard Anthony Salisbury: Leucadendrum grandiflorum in 1808 (now Leucospermum grandiflorum). Joseph Knight published a book in 1809 titled On the cultivation of the plants belonging to the natural order of Proteeae, that contained an extensive revision of the Proteaceae attributed to Salisbury. Salisbury assigned twenty-four species to