Aralidium is a genus in the plant family Torricelliaceae

Torricelliaceae

Torricelliaceae is a family of trees native to Madagascar and south-west Asia. It contains three genera, Aralidium, Melanophylla and Torricellia...

. It includes the single species Aralidium pinnatifidum, a small tree or shrub distributed in southeastern Asia

Asia

Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...

, Malaysia, and Indonesia

Indonesia

Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...

.

Taxonomic placement of this genus has proven difficult because it possesses characters in common with both the Araliaceae

Araliaceae

Araliaceae is a family of flowering plants, also known as the Aralia family or Ivy family. The family includes 254 species of trees, shrubs, lianas and perennial herbaceous plants into 2 subfamilies...

 and Cornaceae

Cornaceae

Cornaceae is a cosmopolitan family of flowering plants in the order Cornales. It contains approximately 110 species, mostly trees and shrubs, which may be deciduous or evergreen. Members of this family usually have opposite or alternate simple leaves, four- or five-parted flowers clustered in...

. In the Cronquist system

Cronquist system

The Cronquist system is a taxonomic classification system of flowering plants. It was developed by Arthur Cronquist in his texts An Integrated System of Classification of Flowering Plants and The Evolution and Classification of Flowering Plants .Cronquist's system places flowering plants into two...

, it was placed in Cornaceae, but the APG II system

APG II system

The APG II system of plant classification is the second, now obsolete, version of a modern, mostly molecular-based, system of plant taxonomy that was published in April 2003 by the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group. It was a revision of the first APG system, published in 1998, and was superseded in 2009...

 give it its own family, Aralidiaceae, with the proviso that "[s]ome of the families are monogeneric and could possibly be merged when well-supported sister-group relationships have been established." Such a relationship was established between Aralidium, Melanophylla

Melanophylla

Melanophylla is a genus of flowering plants endemic to Madagascar. The genus contains seven species of small trees and shrubs.Under the APG II system this genus was placed alone in family Melanophyllaceae, but with the rider that "[s]ome of the families are monogeneric and could possibly be merged...

and Torricellia in 2004, resulting in the transfer of the first two of these genera into Torricelliaceae.