In order to rapidly and accurately measure the size and the shape of Chinese herbal medicine cell, the digital image-plane holographic microscopy (DIPHM) with spherical reference wave is studied theoretically and experimentally. The results show that: through appropriately adjusting the location of the reference light source, DIPHM with spherical reference wave can rapidly and accurately eliminate the quadratic phase aberration introduced by microscope objective. The automatic procedure for aberration compensation can rapidly and efficiently eliminate the aberration brought by the bias of spherical point source in the reference light path in DIPHM, and then accurate phase reconstruction of the sample can be achieved. Based on the above study, the elliptical typhaceae pollen as a kind of Chinese herbal medicine cell is quantitatively imaged using DIPHM. Through the accurate three-dimensional phase distribution, the morphological image and the size of elliptical Typhaceae pollen are obtained.