Spurges And Willows (Malpighiales)

This group gathers Flowering Plants subcategory members belonging to the order Malpighiales, one of the largest orders of flowering plants and also one of the most morphologically varied, spanning everything from timber trees to floating aquatics to leafless parasites. It includes the spurge family Euphorbiaceae, defined chemically by a milky, often toxic latex sap, the willow family Salicaceae (willows and poplars), the passionflower family Passifloraceae, the violet family Violaceae, the mangrove family Rhizophoraceae, whose stilt-rooted trees line tropical coastlines, and the Rafflesia family Rafflesiaceae, an extreme case of the order's diversity: a leafless, stemless internal parasite of tropical vines that produces the single largest individual flower of any plant on Earth. Modern molecular studies place Rafflesiaceae firmly within Malpighiales despite its outwardly bizarre form, a placement this group follows over the older assumption that its flower shape alone marked it as unrelated to ordinary trees and shrubs.