Rousseaceae is a
plant
Plants are predominantly photosynthetic eukaryotes of the kingdom Plantae. Historically, the plant kingdom encompassed all living things that were not animals, and included algae and fungi; however, all current definitions of Plantae exclu ...
family in the order
Asterales
Asterales () is an order of dicotyledonous flowering plants that includes the large family Asteraceae (or Compositae) known for composite flowers made of florets, and ten families related to the Asteraceae. While asterids in general are charact ...
containing trees and shrubs. The fruit is a berry or capsule. Leaves are simple, with toothed margins. Leaf stipules are not seen in this group.
The family contains four genera and twelve or thirteen species. From
Mauritius
Mauritius ( ; french: Maurice, link=no ; mfe, label= Mauritian Creole, Moris ), officially the Republic of Mauritius, is an island nation in the Indian Ocean about off the southeast coast of the African continent, east of Madagascar. It ...
,
Australia,
New Guinea
New Guinea (; Hiri Motu: ''Niu Gini''; id, Papua, or , historically ) is the world's second-largest island with an area of . Located in Oceania in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, the island is separated from Australia by the wide Torr ...
,
New Zealand
New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island count ...
and a few other Pacific Islands. The genera ''
Abrophyllum
''Abrophyllum'' ( syn.: ''Brachynema'' F.Muell.) is a monotypic genus of flowering plants in the family Saxifragaceae ''sensu lato'' according to Engler, A. in Engler & Prantl and Schulze-Menz, G. K. in Melchior, 1964; placed in Subfamily Escall ...
'', ''
Cuttsia
''Cuttsia viburnea'' is a shrub or bushy tree which has toothed leaves and panicles of white flowers, and that is endemic to eastern Australia. It is sometimes called silver-leaved cuttsia, and confusingly also native elderberry, honey bush or na ...
'' and ''
Carpodetus
''Carpodetus'' is a genus of flowering plants in the Rousseaceae family. It was formerly considered to lie within the Escalloniaceae. Its species occur in New Guinea, New Zealand, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu. The genus is characterised by small ...
'' have been formerly placed in a separate family, Carpodetaceae, or within
Escalloniaceae
Escalloniaceae is a family of flowering plants consisting of about 130 species in seven genera. In the APG II system it is one of eight families in the euasterids II clade (campanulids) that are unplaced as to order. More recent research has prov ...
.
Taxonomy
''Roussea'' is sister to the remainder of the family and is most distanced from the other genera. ''Carpodetus'' is the sister to the clade consisting of ''Abrophyllum'' and ''Cuttsia''. This results in the following phylogenetic tree.
References
{{Taxonbar, from=Q132691
Asterales families