Aphloiaceae Takht.

Armen Takhtajan

Armen Leonovich Takhtajan or Takhtajian , was a Soviet-Armenian botanist, one of the most important figures in 20th century plant evolution and systematics and biogeography. His other interests included morphology of flowering plants, paleobotany, and the flora of the Caucasus...

 1985, is a monogeneric family

Family (biology)

In biological classification, family is* a taxonomic rank. Other well-known ranks are life, domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, genus, and species, with family fitting between order and genus. As for the other well-known ranks, there is the option of an immediately lower rank, indicated by the...

 of flowering plant

Flowering plant

The flowering plants , also known as Angiospermae or Magnoliophyta, are the most diverse group of land plants. Angiosperms are seed-producing plants like the gymnosperms and can be distinguished from the gymnosperms by a series of synapomorphies...

s. It contains only one species Aphloia theiformis (Vahl) Benn., a species of evergreen shrubs or small trees occurring in East Africa

East Africa

East Africa or Eastern Africa is the easterly region of the African continent, variably defined by geography or geopolitics. In the UN scheme of geographic regions, 19 territories constitute Eastern Africa:...

, Madagascar

Madagascar

The Republic of Madagascar is an island country located in the Indian Ocean off the southeastern coast of Africa...

, the Mascarene Islands

Mascarene Islands

The Mascarene Islands is a group of islands in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar comprising Mauritius, Réunion, Rodrigues, Cargados Carajos shoals, plus the former islands of the Saya de Malha, Nazareth and Soudan banks...

 and the Seychelles

Seychelles

Seychelles , officially the Republic of Seychelles , is an island country spanning an archipelago of 115 islands in the Indian Ocean, some east of mainland Africa, northeast of the island of Madagascar....

.

The genus Aphloia was described by Bennett in 1840 and included in Flacourtiaceae

Flacourtiaceae

Flacourtiaceae is a defunct family of flowering plants whose former members have been scattered to various other families, mostly to Achariaceae, Samydaceae, and Salicaceae. It was so vaguely defined that hardly anything seemed out of place there and it became a dumping ground for odd and anomalous...

, where most classifications continued to include it until Takhtajan recognized its misplacement and created the new family Aphloiaceae in Violales

Violales

Violales is a botanical name of an order of flowering plants and takes its name from the included family Violaceae. The name has been used in several systems, although some systems used the name Parietales for similar groupings...

 to accommodate it. In 2003 the AGP II

Angiosperm Phylogeny Group

The Angiosperm Phylogeny Group, or APG, refers to an informal international group of systematic botanists who came together to try to establish a consensus on the taxonomy of flowering plants that would reflect new knowledge about plant relationships discovered through phylogenetic studies., three...

 included Aphloiaceae in the Rosids

Rosids

The rosids are members of a large clade of flowering plants, containing about 70,000 species, more than a quarter of all angiosperms. The clade is divided into 16 to 20 orders, depending upon circumscription and classification. These orders, in turn, together comprise about 140 families...

 without specifying an order. Matthews & Endress (2005) and Stevens (2006) include the family in an enlarged order Crossosomatales

Crossosomatales

The Crossosomatales are an order, newly recognized by the AGP II, of flowering plants, included within the Rosids, which are part of the eudicots...

.