Livistona is a genus of palms, the botanical family Arecaceae, native to southeastern and eastern Asia, Australasia, and the Horn of Africa.[2] They are fan palms, the leaves with an armed petiole terminating in a rounded, costapalmate fan of numerous leaflets.[3][4][5]
The genus was established by Robert Brown in his Prodromus Florae Novae Hollandiae (1810) to accommodate his descriptions of two species collected during an expedition to Australia. The names published by Brown were Livistona humilis and L. inermis, describing material he had collected in the north of Australia, a partial taxonomic revision in 1963 nominated the first of these as the lectotype. His collaborator Ferdinand Bauer, the botanist and master illustrator, produced artworks to accompany Brown's descriptions, but these were not published until 1838.[7]
In 1983 a species of palm from Somalia was formally transferred to the genus by John Dransfield and Natalie Whitford Uhl.[3]
The Australian members of the genus were subjected to a taxonomic revision by Tony Rodd in 1998. Rodd added five new Australian species, increasing the size of the genus.[7] Another species was described from Vietnam in 2000. In 2009 John Leslie Dowe published the latest monograph on the genus. Along with the Indonesian botanist Johanis P. Mogea and Anders Sánchez Barfod from Denmark, he had described five new species in the previous years, further swelling the genus.[3]
For much of the history of the genus, the species of the genus Saribus were classified within the genus Livistona. Phylogenetic studies using DNA comparisons of numerous species in the different genera in the Trachycarpeae tribe of palms, however, found that the species from the Philippines, New Guinea and other surrounding regions were more closely related to Pholidocarpus, Licuala and Johannesteijsmannia than they were to Livistona, which advocated separating the two groups taxonomically. The genus was thus revised again by Christine D. Bacon and William J. Baker in 2011, with Saribus split off and combined with Pritchardiopsis jeanneneyi, decreasing the genus again.[8]
Robert Brown named the genus Livistona after Patrick Murray (1634–1671), Baron of Livingston, a botanist and horticulturist, who was largely responsible for establishing the botanical gardens in Edinburgh, Scotland.[9][10][11] Brown's praise for the early horticulturist begins, "… in memoriam viri nobilis Patricii Murray Baronis de Livistone,", and the Latinised name of the genus is evidently derived from the name of the family's seat.[7]
