Show only certain items in legend Python Matplotlib

Question

I currently am plotting a stacked bar graph of a large amount of taxonomic data, and only wish to show significant species in the legend (out of ~500 I wish to show ~25). Is there a simple way to do this? Below is the code I have:

labels=['0','20','40','60','80','100','120']
ax1=subj1df.plot(kind='barh', stacked=True,legend=True,cmap='Paired', grid=False)
legend(ncol=2,loc=2, bbox_to_anchor=(1.05, 1), borderaxespad=0.)
label1=['Baseline','8h','24h','48h','96h','120h']
ax1.set_yticklabels(label1, fontdict=None, minor=False)
plt.title('Subject 1 Phyla',fontweight='bold')
plt.savefig('Subject1Phyla.eps', format='eps', dpi=1000)
ax1.set_xticklabels(labels)

Edit: tried adding this to show only one legend entry, however only returns an empty legend:

h, l = ax1.get_legend_handles_labels()
legend(l[4],h[4],ncol=2,loc=2, bbox_to_anchor=(1.05, 1), borderaxespad=0.)

Answer 1

This works:

plt.plot(x, y, label='_nolegend_')

source