Amborella

Amborella trichopoda is a rare shrub found only in New Caledonia. It is of botanical interest because genetic studies place it at or near the base of the flowering plants. That is, it represents a line of flowering plants that very early on diverged from all the other extant species of flowering plants, and so gives us some ideas about what the ancestral flowering plants were like. In newer classification schemes, Amborella is given its own family and order. The older Cronquist system treated it as a family within the order Laurales.

The leaves are alternately arranged, evergreen, simple, with a serrated margin, and about 8–10 cm long. Amborella produces small flowers 4–8 mm across in loose clusters, each flower with several spirally-arranged tepals. Amborella is dioecious: each flower produces both stamens and carpels, but only one sex develops fully and fertile in the flowers of an individual plant, the structures of the other sex remaining undeveloped. The fruit is a red berry containing a single seed, 5–8 mm long.

This plant is under pressure in the wild form overgrazing and habitat destruction.

External links

• National Tropical Botanical Garden (Hawaii, USA): article with detailed photos of plants in cultivation
• Entry in Watson and Dallwitz's 'The families of flowering plants'