Born in Marseille, at the age of sixteen he entered the religious order of the Minims. He devoted himself to the study of mathematics and physics, made physical instruments, and was an excellent draughtsman, painter, and turner.

On being sent to the French monastery of Trinità dei Monti at Rome, Plumier studied botany under two members of the order, and especially under the Cistercian botanist, Paolo Boccone. After his return to France, he became a pupil of Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, whom he accompanied on botanical expeditions.

He also explored the coasts of Provence and Languedoc. His work began in 1689, when, by order of the government, he accompanied Surian to the French Antilles. As this first journey proved very successful, Plumier was appointed royal botanist. In 1693, by command of Louis XIV of France, he made his second journey, and in 1695 his third journey to the Antilles and Central America. While in the West Indies, he was assisted by the Dominican botanist Jean-Baptiste Labat. In 1704, when about to start on his fourth journey, intending to visit the home of the true cinchona tree in Peru, he was taken ill with pleurisy and died at Puerto de Santa Maria near Cadiz.

He is considered one of the most important of the botanical explorers of his time. All natural scientists of the 18th century spoke of him with admiration. Tournefort and Linnaeus named in his honour the genus Plumiera, which belongs to the family Apocynaceae and is indigenous in about forty species to Central America. It is now called Plumeria, with the name of Plumeroideae, for its first sub-family.

Plumier identified and described the Fuchsia, which he discovered on the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean in 1696-7. He published his first description of the Fuchsia (Fuchsia triphylla, flore coccineo) in 1703. The French explorer and botanist Louis Feuillée was one of his pupils.

His first work was Description des plantes de l'Amérique (Paris, 1693); it contained 108 plates, half of which represented ferns. This was followed by Nova plantarum americanarum genera (Paris, 1703 – 04), with 40 plates; in this work about one hundred genera, with about seven hundred species, were redescribed. At a later date, Linnaeus adopted in his system, almost without change, these and other newly described genera arranged by Plumier. Plumier left a work in French and Latin ready to be printed entitled Traité des fougères de l'Amérique (Paris, 1705), which contained 170 excellent plates. The publication "Filicetum Americanum" (Paris, 1703), with 222 plates, was compiled from those already mentioned. Plumier also wrote another book of an entirely different character on turning, L'Art de tourner (Lyons, 1701; Paris, 1749); this was translated into Russian by Peter the Great. The manuscript of the translation is at St. Petersburg.

At his death Plumier left thirty-one manuscript volumes containing descriptions, and about 6,000 drawings, 4,000 of which were of plants, while the remainder reproduced American animals of nearly all classes, especially birds and fish. The botanist Herman Boerhaave had 508 of these drawings copied at Paris; these were published later by Burmann, Professor of Botany at Amsterdam, under the title: "Plantarum americanarum, quas olim Carolus Plumierus detexit", fasc. I-X (Amsterdam, 1755 – 1760), containing 262 plates. Plumier also wrote treatises for the Journal des Savants and for the Mémoires de Trévoux. Through his observations in Martinique, Plumier proved that the cochineal belongs to the animal kingdom and should be classed among the insects.