Christiaan Hendrik Persoon (1 February 1761 – 16 November 1836) was a Cape Colony mycologist who made additions to Linnaeus' mushroom taxonomy.

[2] He moved to Paris in 1802, where he spent the rest of his life, renting an upper floor of a house in a poor part of town.

Because of his financial difficulties, Persoon agreed to donate his herbarium to the House of Orange, in return for an adequate pension for life.

[4] From 1805 to 1807, he published two volumes of his Synopsis plantarum (Archived 20 May 2011 at the Wayback Machine), a popular work describing 20,000 species of all types of plants.

The title Persoonia is also given to a biannual scientific journal of molecular phylogeny and evolution of fungi, published jointly by the National Herbarium of the Netherlands and the CBS Fungal Biodiversity Centre.