The current work proposes an innovative methodology for the recognition of plant species by using a combination of shape and texture features from leaf images. The leaf shape is modeled using Curvelet Coefficients and Invariant Moments while texture is modeled using a Ridge Filter and some statistical measures derived from the filtered image. As the features are sensitive to geometric orientations of the leaf image, a pre processing step is performed to make features invariant to geometric trans- formations. To classify images to pre- defined classes, a Neuro fuzzy classifier is used. Experimental results show that the method achieves acceptable recognition rates for images varying in texture, shape and orientation. © Springer India 2016.