This book quickly became a standard work on the evolution of botany as a scientific field, used by contemporary peers [3] and is still being used by modern scientists into the beginning of the 21st century.

[2] In 1859, he was appointed assistant in plant physiology at the Agriculture College and Forest Academy in Tharandt where he started to write Handbuch der Experimentalphysiologie des Pflanzen.

[10] The book presented different works of classification based on physiology, phytonomy and morphology done by botanists such as Andrea Caesalpino (1516–1603), Otto Brunfels (1488–1534), Leonhart Fuchs (1501–1566), Hieronymus Bock (1497/98–1554), Matthias de l’Obel (1538–1616), Gaspard Bauhin (1541–1613), Charles Darwin (1809–1882), Karl Nageli (1817–1891), Hugo von Mohl (1805–1872), and others.

[9] The first book, History of Morphology and Classification, discusses the work of botanists since Brunfels to Caspar Bauhin, as well as metamorphosis and the spiral theory, and the terminology of botany used which distinguishes between Cesalpino's time to Linnaeus from 1583 to 1760.

[11] A review of the book by the journal the American Naturalist congratulates the German Royal Academy of Sciences for selecting Sachs as the author of the book on the botanical history by stating: “Germans may, however, well be proud of the large and honorable share which their country men are here shown to have taken in the advancement of the science, and they may congratulate themselves upon the selection of an historian who has not ignored the claims of other nations”.

[15] Some late historians of science harshly criticized Sachs's History of Botany pointing out historical inaccuracies in his book.

Marshall A. Howe dislikes the predominantly German focus of the book and E. L. Greene wrote: “Julius von Sachs, the last in the line, copied Sprengel’s caption The German Fathers, etc., but knew next to nothing of their works, even rating as unimportant Valerius Cordus, who was immeasurably the greatest of them all.”[16][17] E. L. Greene also accuses Sachs of discarding the role of Dioscorides as one of the firsts to recognize natural families of plants by stating that: “it is propagating fable in place of history to affirm that natural families were first recognized and indicated by any Linnaeus, or Adanson, or Jussieu of the eighteenth century”.

[11] Harvey-Gibson uses this claim to blame Sachs for overlooking the importance of men like Theophrastus, Tournefort and Haller in the history of botany, preferring the “dull crabbed phraseology of the German herbalists of the sixteenth century”.