Coffee Family
Rubiaceae (roo-bi-A-see-ee)
Iconic Features
- Leaves simple and entire
- Leaves opposite or whorled
- Small star-shaped flowers
- Ovary usually inferior
Description (Jepson)
- Eudicotyledons (eudicots) – a major lineage of flowering plants including most plants traditionally described as dicots and generally characterized by
- 2 seed leaves (dicotyledon)
- Netted (reticulate) leaf venation
- Flower parts in fours and fives
- Pollen grains with 3 pores (tricolpate)
- Vascular bundles in stem arranged in a ring
- Taproot system
- Annual and perennial herbs and shrubs (some trees and vines)
- Stems sometimes square
- Leaves
- Simple (not divided into leaflets) and entire (with smooth margins)
- Usually opposite (2 leaves at each junction with stem) or whorled (3 or more leaves/flowers at stem junction)
- Flowers
- Inflorescence (flower arrangement) in a great variety of forms
- Small, usually bisexual, star-shaped flowers
- Flower parts usually in fours
- Ovary usually inferior (below the attachment of other flower parts)
- Fruit is a drupe (a fleshy fruit with usually 1 seed in a hard inner shell — a stone fruit), berry (a usually multi-seeded fruit with a fleshy ovary wall), or nutlet (a small, dry fruit that does not split open, derived from a multi-chambered ovary)
Notes
- Approximately 6,000 species worldwide
- Includes bedstraws, coffee species, gardenias, and Cinchona species (source of quinine)
- Scientific name from the included genus Rubia, from the Latin for “red”
- Rubia species were extensively cultivated in the past as the source of a commercially important red dye, commonly called madder
- Represented by 6 species at Edgewood
Browse Some Edgewood Plants in this Family
