The Brassicales are an order of flowering plants, belonging to the eurosids II group of dicotyledons under the APG II system. One character common to many members of the order is the production of glucosinolate compounds. Most systems of classification have included this order, although sometimes under the name Capparales.
Brassicaceae or Cruciferae is a medium-sized and economically important family of flowering plants commonly known as the mustards, the crucifers, or the cabbage family. Most are herbaceous plants, while some are shrubs. The leaves are simple, lack stipules, and appear alternately on stems or in rosettes. The inflorescences are terminal and lack bracts. The flowers have four free sepals, four free alternating petals, two shorter free stamens and four longer free stamens. The fruit has seeds in rows, divided by a thin wall.
The Magnoliaceae are a flowering plant family, the magnolia family, in the order Magnoliales. It consists of two genera: Magnolia and Liriodendron.
Caryophyllaceae, commonly called the pink family or carnation family, is a family of flowering plants. It is included in the dicotyledon order Caryophyllales in the APG III system, alongside 33 other families, including Amaranthaceae, Cactaceae, and Polygonaceae. It is a large family, with 81 genera and about 2,625 known species.
Amaranthaceae is a family of flowering plants commonly known as the amaranth family, in reference to its type genus Amaranthus. It includes the former goosefoot family Chenopodiaceae and contains about 165 genera and 2,040 species, making it the most species-rich lineage within its parent order, Caryophyllales.
Geraniaceae is a family of flowering plants placed in the order Geraniales. The family name is derived from the genus Geranium. The family includes both the genus Geranium and the garden plants called geraniums, which modern botany classifies as genus Pelargonium, along with other related genera.
Amborella is a monotypic genus of understory shrubs or small trees endemic to the main island, Grande Terre, of New Caledonia in the southwest Pacific Ocean. The genus is the only member of the family Amborellaceae and the order Amborellales and contains a single species, Amborella trichopoda. Amborella is of great interest to plant systematists because molecular phylogenetic analyses consistently place it as the sister group to all other flowering plants.
Hamamelidaceae, commonly referred to as the witch-hazel family, is a family of flowering plants in the order Saxifragales. The clade consists of shrubs and small trees positioned within the woody clade of the core Saxifragales. An earlier system, the Cronquist system, recognized Hamamelidaceae in the Hamamelidales order.
The Hernandiaceae are a family of flowering plants (angiosperms) in the order Laurales. Consisting of five genera with about 58 known species, they are distributed over the world's tropical areas, some of them widely distributed in coastal areas, but they occur from sea level to over 2000 m.
Sabiaceae is a family of flowering plants that were placed in the order Proteales according to the APG IV system. It comprises three genera, Meliosma, Ophiocaryon and Sabia, with 66 known species, native to tropical to warm temperate regions of southern Asia and the Americas. The family has also been called Meliosmaceae Endl., 1841, nom. rej.
Trochodendraceae is the only family of flowering plants in the order Trochodendrales. It comprises two extant genera, each with a single species along with up to five additional extinct genera and a number of extinct species. The living species are native to south east Asia. The two living species both have secondary xylem without vessel elements, which is quite rare in angiosperms. As the vessel-free wood suggests primitiveness, these two species have attracted much taxonomic attention.
Chloranthaceae is a family of flowering plants (angiosperms), the only family in the order Chloranthales. It is not closely related to any other family of flowering plants, and is among the early-diverging lineages in the angiosperms. They are woody or weakly woody plants occurring in Southeast Asia, the Pacific, Madagascar, Central and South America, and the West Indies. The family consists of four extant genera, totalling about 77 known species according to Christenhusz and Byng in 2016. Some species are used in traditional medicine. The type genus is Chloranthus. The fossil record of the family, mostly represented by pollen such as Clavatipollenites, extends back to the dawn of the history of flowering plants in the Early Cretaceous, and has been found on all continents.
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.
Calyceraceae is a plant family in the order Asterales. The natural distribution of the about sixty species belonging to this family is restricted to the southern half of South America. The species of the family resemble both the family Asteraceae and the Dipsacaceae.
Ruppia, also known as the widgeonweeds, ditch grasses or widgeon grass, is the only extant genus in the family Ruppiaceae, with eight known species. These are aquatic plants widespread over much of the world. The genus name honours Heinrich Bernhard Rupp, a German botanist (1688-1719). They are widespread outside of frigid zones and the tropics.
Huerteales is the botanical name for an order of flowering plants. It is one of the 17 orders that make up the large eudicot group known as the rosids in the APG III system of plant classification. Within the rosids, it is one of the orders in Malvidae, a group formerly known as eurosids II and now known informally as the malvids. This is true whether Malvidae is circumscribed broadly to include eight orders as in APG III, or more narrowly to include only four orders. Huerteales consists of four small families, Petenaeaceae, Gerrardinaceae, Tapisciaceae, and Dipentodontaceae.
The Capparaceae, commonly known as the caper family, are a family of plants in the order Brassicales. As currently circumscribed, the family contains 15 genera and about 430 species. The largest genera are Capparis, Morisonia, Maerua, Boscia, and Cadaba.
Aphloia is a genus of flowering plants that contains a single species, Aphloia theiformis, the sole species of the monogeneric family Aphloiaceae. It is a species of evergreen shrubs or small trees occurring in East Africa, Madagascar, the Mascarene Islands and the Seychelles.
Pentadiplandra brazzeana is an evergreen shrub or liana that is the only species assigned to the genus Pentadiplandra, and has been placed in a family of its own called Pentadiplandraceae. It produces large red berries, sometimes mottled with grey. It is known from West-Central Tropical Africa, between northern Angola, eastern Nigeria and western Democratic Republic of Congo. The berry is sweet in taste due to the protein, brazzein, which is substantially sweeter than saccharose. Brazzein may be useful as a low-calorie sweetener, but is not yet allowed as a food additive in the United States and the European Union.
Borthwickia is genus of flowering plants, containing one species, Borthwickia trifoliata from Yunnan, China and Myanmar. The common name in Chinese is 节蒴木. It is a shrub or small tree with evergreen trifoliate leaves, whitish flowers clustered at the tip of the branches, with many stamens, and thin, knobbly, drooping fruits with many small red seeds.
