The Cucurbitales are an order of flowering plants, included in the rosid group of dicotyledons. This order mostly belongs to tropical areas, with limited presence in subtropical and temperate regions. The order includes shrubs and trees, together with many herbs and climbers. One major characteristic of the Cucurbitales is the presence of unisexual flowers, mostly pentacyclic, with thick pointed petals. The pollination is usually performed by insects, but wind pollination is also present.
The Malpighiales comprise one of the largest orders of flowering plants. The order is very diverse, with well-known members including willows, violets, aspens and poplars, poinsettia, corpse flower, coca plant, cassava, flaxseed, castor bean, Saint John's wort, passionfruit, mangosteen, and manchineel tree.
Saxifragales is an order of angiosperms, or flowering plants, containing 15 botanical families and around 100 genera, with nearly 2,500 species. Of the 15 families, many are small, with eight of them being monotypic. The largest family is the Crassulaceae (stonecrops), a diverse group of mostly succulent plants, with about 35 genera. Saxifragales are found worldwide, primarily in temperate to subtropical zones, rarely being encountered growing wild in the tropics; however, many species are now cultivated throughout the world as knowledge of plant husbandry has improved. They can be found in a wide variety of environments, from deserts to fully aquatic habitats, with species adapted to alpine, forested or fully-aquatic habitats. Many are epiphytic or lithophytic, growing on exposed cliff faces, on trees or on rocks, and not requiring a highly organic or nutrient-dense substrate to thrive.
Rafflesia, or stinking corpse lily, is a genus of parasitic flowering plants in the family Rafflesiaceae. The species have enormous flowers, the buds rising from the ground or directly from the lower stems of their host plants; one species has the largest flower in the world. Plants of the World Online lists up to 41 species from this genus; all of them are found throughout Southeast Asia.
Under the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants (ICN), Rosidae is a botanical name at the rank of subclass. Circumscription of the subclass will vary with the taxonomic system being used; the only requirement being that it includes the family Rosaceae.
The Salicaceae are the willow family of flowering plants. The traditional family included the willows, poplars. Genetic studies summarized by the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (APG) have greatly expanded the circumscription of the family to contain 56 genera and about 1220 species, including the tropical Scyphostegiaceae and many of the former Flacourtiaceae.
The Celastrales are an order of flowering plants found throughout the tropics and subtropics, with only a few species extending far into the temperate regions. The 1200 to 1350 species are in about 100 genera. All but seven of these genera are in the large family Celastraceae. Until recently, the composition of the order and its division into families varied greatly from one author to another.
The Flacourtiaceae is a defunct family of flowering plants whose former members have been scattered to various families, mostly to the Achariaceae and Salicaceae. It was so vaguely defined that hardly anything seemed out of place there and it became a dumping ground for odd and anomalous genera, gradually making the family even more heterogeneous. In 1975, Hermann Sleumer noted that "Flacourtiaceae as a family is a fiction; only the tribes are homogeneous."
Phyllanthaceae is a family of flowering plants in the eudicot order Malpighiales. It is most closely related to the family Picrodendraceae.
Ochnaceae is a family of flowering plants in the order Malpighiales. In the APG III system of classification of flowering plants, Ochnaceae is defined broadly, to include about 550 species, and encompasses what some taxonomists have treated as the separate families Medusagynaceae and Quiinaceae. In a phylogenetic study that was published in 2014, Ochnaceae was recognized in the broad sense, but two works published after APG III have accepted the small families Medusagynaceae and Quiinaceae. These have not been accepted by APG IV (2016).
Peridiscaceae is a family of flowering plants in the order Saxifragales. Four genera comprise this family: Medusandra, Soyauxia, Peridiscus, and Whittonia., with a total of 12 known species. It has a disjunct distribution, with Peridiscus occurring in Venezuela and northern Brazil, Whittonia in Guyana, Medusandra in Cameroon, and Soyauxia in tropical West Africa. Whittonia is possibly extinct, being known from only one specimen collected below Kaieteur Falls in Guyana. In 2006, archeologists attempted to rediscover it, however, it proved unsuccessful.
Hydnoroideae is a subfamily of parasitic flowering plants in the order Piperales. Traditionally, and as recently as the APG III system it given family rank under the name Hydnoraceae. It is now submerged in the Aristolochiaceae. It contains two genera, Hydnora and Prosopanche:
Dipentodon is a genus of flowering plants in the family Dipentodontaceae. Its only species, Dipentodon sinicus, is a small, deciduous tree native to southern China, northern Myanmar, and northern India. It has been little studied and until recently its affinities remained obscure.
Cytinaceae is a family of parasitic flowering plants. It comprises two genera, Cytinus and Bdallophytum, totalling ten species.
The basal angiosperms are the flowering plants which diverged from the lineage leading to most flowering plants. In particular, the most basal angiosperms were called the ANITA grade, which is made up of Amborella, Nymphaeales and Austrobaileyales.
When the APG II system of plant classification was published in April 2003, fifteen genera and three families were placed incertae sedis in the angiosperms, and were listed in a section of the appendix entitled "Taxa of uncertain position".
The family Apodanthaceae comprises about 10 species of endoparasitic herbs. They live in the branches or stems of their hosts, emerging only to flower and fruit. The plants produce no green parts and do not carry out any photosynthesis. There are two genera: Pilostyles and Apodanthes. A third genus, Berlinianche, was never validly published.
Pilostyles is a genus of flowering plants in the family Apodanthaceae. It includes about 11 species of very small, completely parasitic plants that live inside the stems of woody legumes. Plants of this genus are sometimes referred to as stemsuckers.
In phylogenetic nomenclature, the Pentapetalae are a large group of eudicots that were informally referred to as the "core eudicots" in some papers on angiosperm phylogenetics. They comprise an extremely large and diverse group accounting for about 65% of the species richness of the angiosperms, with wide variability in habit, morphology, chemistry, geographic distribution, and other attributes. Classical systematics, based solely on morphological information, was not able to recognize this group. In fact, the circumscription of the Pentapetalae as a clade is based on strong evidence obtained from DNA molecular analysis data.
Daniel Lee Nickrent is an American botanist, working in plant evolutionary biology, including the subdisciplines of genomics, phylogenetics, systematics, population genetics, and taxonomy. A major focus has been parasitic flowering plants, particularly of the sandalwood order (Santalales). His interest in photographic documentation and photographic databases has led to several photographic databases including Parasitic Plant Connection, Phytoimages, Plant Checklist for the Rocky Mountain National Park, and Plant Checklist for the Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge.
