Recognizing a plant in any huge vegetation is a tedious work for us. We recognize a plant on the basis of its size, leaves, flowers, fruits, etc. Leaf is a part of the plant which can be found on plants almost in all seasons and most of the time we have to recognize plants on the basis of its leaf. But when dealing with leaf of plant, it is important to consider the finer details of the contour representing the shape of the leaf. We are trying to build a system which has a database of leaves of different plants and given a leaf, we find out the plant to which it may belong. In this paper, we present the results of tangential angle approach used for retrieval. A database of around one thousand leaves of different plants has been created. Each leaf image is preprocessed to extract its boundary. Then tangential angle approach is applied which captures the angular details of the boundary of shape. We have done the testing for around 1000 leaves and on the basis of that recall, precision and error rate have been calculated to measure the effectiveness of the proposed method.