Myrsinaceae, or the myrsine family, was formerly recognized as a rather large family from the order Ericales, consisting of 35 genera and about 1000 species. It is a widespread family found in temperate to tropical climates extending north to Europe, Siberia, Japan, Mexico, and Florida, and south to New Zealand, South America, and South Africa.
Family is one of the eight major hierarchical taxonomic ranks in Linnaean taxonomy; it is classified between order and genus. A family may be divided into subfamilies, which are intermediate ranks between the ranks of family and genus. The official family names are Latin in origin; however, popular names are often used: for example, walnut trees and hickory trees belong to the family Juglandaceae, but that family is commonly referred to as being the "walnut family".
In biological classification, taxonomic rank is the relative level of a group of organisms in a taxonomic hierarchy. Examples of taxonomic ranks are species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom, domain, etc.
The Ericales are a large and diverse order of dicotyledons, including, for example, tea, persimmon, blueberry, Brazil nut, and azalea. The order includes trees, bushes, lianas, and herbaceous plants. Together with ordinary autophytic plants, the Ericales include chlorophyll-deficient mycoheterotrophic plants and carnivorous plants.
Plants are mostly mesophytic trees and shrubs; a few are lianas or subherbaceous. Their leathery, evergreen leaves are simple and alternate, with smooth margins and without stipules. They are often dotted with glands and resinous cavities. The latter may take the form of secretory lines.
In botany, a tree is a perennial plant with an elongated stem, or trunk, supporting branches and leaves in most species. In some usages, the definition of a tree may be narrower, including only woody plants with secondary growth, plants that are usable as lumber or plants above a specified height. Trees are not a taxonomic group but include a variety of plant species that have independently evolved a woody trunk and branches as a way to tower above other plants to compete for sunlight. Trees tend to be long-lived, some reaching several thousand years old. In wider definitions, the taller palms, tree ferns, bananas, and bamboos are also trees. Trees have been in existence for 370 million years. It is estimated that there are just over 3 trillion mature trees in the world.
A shrub or bush is a small- to medium-sized woody plant. Unlike herbaceous plants, shrubs have persistent woody stems above the ground. They are distinguished from trees by their multiple stems and shorter height, and are usually under 6 m (20 ft) tall. Plants of many species may grow either into shrubs or trees, depending on their growing conditions. Small, low shrubs, generally less than 2 m (6.6 ft) tall, such as lavender, periwinkle and most small garden varieties of rose, are often termed "subshrubs".
A liana is any of various long-stemmed, woody vines that are rooted in the soil at ground level and use trees, as well as other means of vertical support, to climb up to the canopy to get access to well-lit areas of the forest. Lianas are characteristic of tropical moist deciduous forests, but may be found in temperate rainforests. There are also temperate lianas, for example the members of the Clematis or Vitis genera. Lianas can form bridges amidst the forest canopy, providing arboreal animals with paths across the forest. These bridges can protect weaker trees from strong winds. Lianas compete with forest trees for sunlight, water and nutrients from the soil. Forests without lianas grow 150% more fruit; trees with lianas have twice the probability of dying.
The plants are mostly monoecious, but a few are dioecious. Their small flowers are arranged in racemose terminal clusters, or in the leaf axils. The flowers have four or five sepals and petals. The floral envelope (perianth) has a distinct calyx and corolla. The calyx is regular and polysepalous. The nonfleshy petals of the corolla are more or less united, closely overlapping. The four or five stamens are usually isomerous with the perianth. The carpel has one style and one stigma, with the ovary unilocular, superior or semi-inferior.
A flower, sometimes known as a bloom or blossom, is the reproductive structure found in flowering plants. The biological function of a flower is to effect reproduction, usually by providing a mechanism for the union of sperm with eggs. Flowers may facilitate outcrossing or allow selfing. Some flowers produce diaspores without fertilization (parthenocarpy). Flowers contain sporangia and are the site where gametophytes develop. Many flowers have evolved to be attractive to animals, so as to cause them to be vectors for the transfer of pollen. After fertilization, the ovary of the flower develops into fruit containing seeds.
A raceme is an unbranched, indeterminate type of inflorescence bearing pedicellate flowers along its axis. In botany, an axis means a shoot, in this case one bearing the flowers. In indeterminate inflorescence-like racemes, the oldest flowers are borne towards the base and new flowers are produced as the shoot grows, with no predetermined growth limit. A plant that flowers on a showy raceme may have this reflected in its scientific name, e.g. Cimicifuga racemosa. A compound raceme, also called a panicle, has a branching main axis. Examples of racemes occur on mustard and radish plants.
A sepal is a part of the flower of angiosperms. Usually green, sepals typically function as protection for the flower in bud, and often as support for the petals when in bloom. The term sepalum was coined by Noël Martin Joseph de Necker in 1790, and derived from the Greek σκεπη (skepi), a covering.
The one-seeded, indehiscent fruit is a thin-fleshed berry or drupe. [1] North American species are the marlberry (Ardisia escalloniodes) and the Florida rapanea (Rapanea punctata).
Dehiscence is the splitting along a built-in line of weakness in a plant structure in order to release its contents, and is common among fruits, anthers and sporangia. Sometimes this involves the complete detachment of a part. Structures that open in this way are said to be dehiscent. Structures that do not open in this way are called indehiscent, and rely on other mechanisms such as decay or predation to release the contents.
In botany, a fruit is the seed-bearing structure in flowering plants formed from the ovary after flowering.
In botany, a berry is a fleshy fruit without a stone produced from a single flower containing one ovary. Berries so defined include grapes, currants, and tomatoes, as well as cucumbers, eggplants (aubergines) and bananas, but exclude certain fruits commonly called berries, such as strawberries and raspberries. The berry is the most common type of fleshy fruit in which the entire outer layer of the ovary wall ripens into a potentially edible "pericarp". Berries may be formed from one or more carpels from the same flower. The seeds are usually embedded in the fleshy interior of the ovary, but there are some non-fleshy exceptions, such as peppers, with air rather than pulp around their seeds.
Plants in the myrsine family have few economic uses. A few genera, such as Ardisia , Cyclamen , Lysimachia , and Myrsine , are grown as ornamental plants, especially Ardisia crispa and Myrsine africana. One species, Ardisia japonica (Chinese: 紫金牛; pinyin: zǐjīn niú), is one of the 50 fundamental herbs in traditional Chinese medicine.
Economic botany is the study of the relationship between people and plants. Economic botany intersects many fields including established disciplines such as agronomy, anthropology, archaeology, chemistry, economics, ethnobotany, ethnology, forestry, genetic resources, geography, geology, horticulture, medicine, microbiology, nutrition, pharmacognosy, and pharmacology. This link between botany and anthropology explores the ways humans use plants for food, medicines, and commerce.
Ardisia is a genus of flowering plants in the family Primulaceae. It was in the former Myrsinaceae family now recognised as the myrsine sub-family Myrsinoideae. They are distributed in the Americas, Asia, Australia, and the Pacific Islands, mainly in the tropics. There are over 700 accepted species. One species, Ardisia japonica is one of the 50 fundamental herbs in traditional Chinese medicine.
Cyclamen is a genus of 23 species of perennial flowering plants in the family Primulaceae. Cyclamen species are native to Europe and the Mediterranean Basin east to Iran, with one species in Somalia. They grow from tubers and are valued for their flowers with upswept petals and variably patterned leaves.
In the APG III system, the Myrsinaceae were not recognized, but were sunk into Primulaceae, which in that system is circumscribed very broadly.
The APG III system of flowering plant classification is the third version of a modern, mostly molecular-based, system of plant taxonomy being developed by the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (APG). Published in 2009, it was superseded in 2016 by a further revision, the APG IV system.
The Primulaceae are a family of herbaceous and woody flowering plants with about 53 genera with 2790 species, including some favorite garden plants and wildflowers, commonly known as the primrose family. Most Primulaceae are perennial though some species, such as scarlet pimpernel, are annuals. The family has been variously circumscribed, but it is now accepted in the broad sense including the former families Myrsinaceae and Theophrastaceae, because many genera traditionally placed in Primulaceae were found to belong to those other families and when united their circumscription remains intact.
In biological taxonomy, circumscription is the definition of a taxon, that is, a group of organisms.
