Ornamental plants are important horticultural crops, and their traits such as plant shape, flower color, flower form, flower fragrance, flowering habitat directly determine their ornamental and market value. Modern molecular breeding techniques are effective ways for rapidly developing new varieties. However, the lack of localization and mining of key genes for important traits greatly limits the application of these techniques in ornamental plants. Genetic linkage map is a linear arrangement map of the relative positions of chromosomal or intra-genomic loci based on the recombination frequency of genetic markers. It is a crucial tool for studying the genetic laws and molecular mechanisms of complex traits in organisms, providing a foundation for the localization, identification and genetic mechanism analysis of key genes for traits, and offering theoretical and practical guidance for molecular breeding. In recent years, with the development of sequencing and molecular biology techniques, some progress has been made in genetic map construction and quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping of ornamental plants, but it lacks systematic induction and summarization. This paper reviews the research progress on the construction of genetic linkage maps and QTL mapping for important ornamental traits including plant shape,