Plants are an indispensable part of our ecosystem and the dwindling number of plant varieties is a serious concern. To conserve plants, their rapid identification by botanists is a must, thus a tool is needed which could identify plants using easily available information, e.g. a photograph of the leaf. This paper tries to fulfill this requirement. An algorithm to recognize and classify a digital image of a leaf is conceptualized and implemented in MATLAB; the leaf database is constructed using MySQL. The developed software uses features based on the shape of the leaf such as aspect ratio, compactness, centroid and edge measure. These features are automatically extracted from a digital image, then converted to numerical parameters to compare with the data stored in the database and the results are displayed. The accuracy of the software was tested with a specimen dataset of 45 leaves and was found to be 83%.