List of early-diverging flowering plant families



There are 27 families of flowering plants whose earliest ancestors diverged from what became the two most prominent groups of flowering plants, the eudicots and monocots. They are quite diverse, with woody and non-woody plants, evergreen and deciduous shrubs and trees, and plants that grow in soil, in water and on other plants.

Victoria amazonica has the largest undivided leaf of any plant, up to 2.65 m in diameter. The parasitic genera Hydnora and Prosopanche are the only flowering plants with no evidence of leaves or scales. Myristica fragrans, the source of nutmeg, was important in the 17th-century spice trade. Amborella may represent the earliest-diverging order of flowering plants.

Glossary
From the glossary of botanical terms:
 * annual: a plant species that completes its life cycle within a single year or growing season
 * basal: attached close to the base (of a plant or an evolutionary tree diagram)
 * herbaceous: not woody; usually green and soft in texture
 * perennial: not an annual or biennial
 * scale: a reduced leaf or a flattened outgrowth
 * woody: hard and lignified; not herbaceous

The APG IV system, the fourth in a series of plant taxonomies from the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group, places the early-diverging families in nine orders. Canellales, Laurales, Magnoliales and Piperales are grouped together as the magnoliid orders, with Chloranthales as a sister group. Amborellales, Nymphaeales and Austrobaileyales are the basal angiosperms or the ANA grade. Ceratophyllales may have been the last of the nine orders to diverge, but some fossil evidence links it to the older order Chloranthales.