Sabal. Sabal etonia . The leaf and fruit cluster are from S. etonia. Sabal palmetto . Both drawn by P.N.Honychurch.

Of the three species of Sabal in Florida, the first discovered by European science was not the most obvious. People from at least the time of Menéndez in the 1560s mentioned cabbage palms (Barrientos 1597), but it was the trunkless S. minor that was first described by Jacquin in 1776. It was not long before S. palmetto was “discovered,” and it was named by American Thomas Walter in 1788. Both put their species in Corypha. The

first Florida palm to be called a Sabal was S. etonia, described in 1896. People had finally discovered Adanson’s Sabal and realized that Corypha was an Old World genus. Sabal now has 15 species (Zona 1990).