Garcinia

N., Mohanan, P. S., Shameer, Abstract, T. Sabu & L., Garcinia, 2023, Taxonomic revision of Garcinia (Clusiaceae) in India, Rheedea 33 (3), pp. 101-158 : 102

HiStory of Garcinia

The genus Garcinia has a long historical, taxonomic, and economic background. Since Linnaeus (1753), many species have been subsequently added to the genus. At the same time, several authors described plants belonging to the genus under different generic names, which subsequently became conspecific with the taxa (Sweeney, 2008). This caused chaos in the nomenclature of these species. Also, many times, the earlier workers described species based on incomplete specimens and even without designating a type. Consequently, modern taxonomic revisions and studies have been undertaken in majority of the centres of diversity of the genus such as Malaysia ( Nazre, 2006), Madagasscar ( Sweeney & Rogers, 2008), Africa, ( Sosef & Dauby, 2012), and Australia ( Cooper, 2013). These studies, however, lacked an Indian perspective.

Linnaeus (1753) named the genus Garcinia to honour Laurentius Garcin (1683–1752), a Dutch army doctor and naturalist in the Dutch Indies ( Indonesia) during 1720–1729, who on his voyage to the Moluccas ( Maluku Islands, Indonesia) made the first ever illustrated description of a fruit -bearing tree, which the locals called ‘mangoustan’ ( Garcin, 1733). Linnaeus named the plant Garcinia mangostana , and the illustration by Garcin was later designated by Hammel (1993) as the lectotype of the species.

The common names used in the pre-Linnaean literature, such as Carcapuli ( Acosta, 1585), Coddam-pulli ( Rheede, 1678) and Mangoustan ( Garcin, 1733), were later diagnosed as members of the family and named as Garcinia cambogioides , G. gummi-gutta and G. mangostana , respectively.

Mangosteens ( G. mangostana ) may be one of the earliest plants to be recorded by Europeans. The name ‘ Mangustoes’ had appeared in Garcia de Orta’s (1563) Colóquios dos simples e drogas he cousas medicinais da Índia, which indicates its usage by the Portuguese in India (Burkill, 1935). Mangosteens were thought to be native to the Moluccas ( Garcin, 1733) or Indonesia and Peninsular Malaysia ( Garcin, 1733; Rumphius, 1741). However, since it has never been found in wild ( Whitmore, 1973; Richard, 1990), it was also suggested to represent a hybrid species ( Nazre, 2006). The place of origin is thought to be Peninsular Malaysia because the closely allied species G. malaccensis Hook. f. and G. celebica L. are indigenous to this area ( Richard, 1990). Mangosteen is believed to have been cultivated for hundreds of years in the Southeast Asian region ( Ramage et al., 2004).