Plant hyperspectral images (HSIs) contain valuable information for agricultural disaster prediction, biomass estimation, and other applications. However, they also include a lot of irrelevant background information, which wastes storage resources. In this paper, we propose a novel recursive sub-tensor hyperspectral compressive sensing method for plant leaves. This method uses recursive sub-tensor compressive sensing to compress and reconstruct each arbitrary-shape leaf region, discarding a large amount of background information to achieve the best possible reconstruction performance of the leaf region and significantly reduce storage space. The proposed method involves several key steps. Firstly, the optimal band is determined using the spatial spectral decorrelation criterion, and its corresponding mask image is used to extract the leaf regions from the background. Secondly, the recursive maximum inscribed rectangle algorithm is applied to obtain rectangular sub-tensors of leaves recursively. Each sub-tensor is then individually compressed and reconstructed. Finally, all sub-tensors can be reconstructed to form complete leaf HSIs without background information. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior image reconstruction quality at extremely low sampling rates compared to other methods. The proposed method can improve average Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) values by about 3.04% and 0.74% compared to Tensor Compressive Sensing (TCS) at the sampling rate of 2%. In the spectral domain, the proposed method can achieve significantly smaller Spectral Angle Mapper (SAM) values and relatively lower spectral indices errors for Double Difference, Triangular Vegetation Index, Leaf Chlorophyll Index, and Modified Normalized Difference 680 than those of TCS. Therefore, the proposed method achieves better compression performance for reconstructed plant leaf HSIs than the other methods.