genus Linkia but the name was eventually rejected in favour of Persoonia. In 1919, French botanist Michel Gandoger described three species all since reallocated to P. linearis; P. phyllostachys from material collected at Mount Wilson sent to him by the herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney, and P. walteri and P. breviuscula from Melbourne-based plant collector Charles Walter, whose records have been questioned. The short-leaved material of P. breviuscula was noted to have been collected in Queensland but this is now thought to have been incorrectly recorded. Gandoger described 212 taxa of Australian plants, almost all of which turned out to be species already described. In 1870, George Bentham published the first infrageneric arrangement of Persoonia in Volume 5 of his landmark Flora Australiensis. He divided the genus into three sections, placing P. linearis in P. sect. Amblyanthera, and recognising Pentadactylon angustifolium as the same species, after examining the specimen in the Banksian Herbarium. He described a variety sericea from the Shoalhaven River region and also noted the discrepancy in Robert Brown's description of the species. Brown had noted the bark to be smooth, in contrast to Ferdinand von Mueller and others who recorded the bark as layered. The genus was reviewed by Peter Weston for the Flora of Australia treatment in 1995, and P. linearis was placed in the Lanceolata group, a group of 54 closely related species with similar flowers but very different foliage. These species will often interbreed with each other where two members of the group occur, and hybrids with P. chamaepeuce, P. conjuncta, P. curvifolia, P. lanceolata, P. media, five subspecies of P. mollis, P. myrtilloides subsp. cunninghamii, P. oleoides, P. pinifolia and P. sericea have been recorded. Robert Brown initially described the hybrid with P. levis as a species "Persoonia lucida", which is now known as Persoonia × lucida, and has been recorded from the southeast forests of the New South Wales south coast. Bentham wrote in 1870 that the name geebung, derived from the Dharug language word geebung or jibbong, which had been used by the indigenous people for the fruits of this species. It goes by the common names of narrow-leaved geebung or narrow-leaf geebung. Naam-burra is an aboriginal name from the Illawarra region. Description Persoonia linearis grows as a tall shrub to small tree, occasionally reaching in height but more commonly around tall. The flaky soft bark is dark