Cordyline Australis - Taxonomy and Names

Taxonomy and Names

Cordyline australis was collected in 1769 by Sir Joseph Banks and Dr Daniel Solander, naturalists on the Endeavour during Lieutenant James Cook's first voyage to the Pacific. The type locality is Queen Charlotte Sound. It was named Dracaena australis by Georg Forster who published it as entry 151 in his Florulae Insularum Australium Prodromus of 1786. It is sometimes still sold as a Dracaena, particularly for the house plant market in Northern Hemisphere countries.

The genus name Cordyline derives from an Ancient Greek word for a club (kordyle), a reference to the enlarged underground stems or rhizomes, while the species name australis is Latin for "southern". The common name cabbage tree is attributed by some sources to early settlers having used the young leaves as a substitute for cabbage. However the name probably predates the settlement of New Zealand — Georg Forster, writing in his Voyage round the World of 1777 about the events of Friday, April 23, 1773, refers on page 114 to the discovery of a related species in Fiordland as "not the true cabbage palm" and says "the central shoot, when quite tender, tastes something like an almond's kernel, with a little of the flavour of cabbage."

Cordyline australis is the tallest of New Zealand's five native Cordyline species. Of these, the commonest are C. banksii, which has a slender, sweeping trunk, and C. indivisa, a handsome plant with a trunk up to 8 metres (26 ft) tall bearing a massive head of broad leaves up to 2 metres (7 ft) long. In the far north of New Zealand, C. australis can be distinguished by its larger heavily branched tree form, narrower leaves and smaller seeds from C. obtecta, the Three Kings cabbage tree, its closest relative. C. australis is rather variable, and forms from the northern offshore islands may be hybrids with C. obtecta. Hybrids with C. pumilio and C. banksii also occur often where the plants are in close vicinity, because they flower at about the same time and share the chromosome number 2n=38, with C. australis.

The tree was well known to Māori before its scientific discovery. The generic Māori language term for plants in the Cordyline genus is tī, and names recorded as specific to C. australis include tī kōuka, tī kāuka, tī rākau, tī awe, tī pua, and tī whanake. Each tribe had names for the tree depending on its local uses and characteristics. Simpson reports that the names highlight the characteristics of the tree that were important to Māori. These include what the plant looked like—whether it was a large tree (tī rākau, tī pua), the whiteness of its flowers (tī puatea), whether its leaves were broad (tī wharanui), twisted along the edges (tī tahanui), or spiky (tī tarariki). Other names refer to its uses—whether its fruit attracted birds (tī manu), or the leaves were particularly suitable for making ropes (tī whanake) and nets (tī kupenga). The most widely used name, tī kōuka, refers to the use of the leaf hearts as food.