The Canellaceae are a family of flowering plants in the order Canellales. The order includes only one other family, the Winteraceae. Canellaceae is native to the Afrotropical and Neotropical realms. They are small to medium trees, rarely shrubs, evergreen and aromatic. The flowers and fruit are often red.

Several species of Canellaceae are important in herbal medicine or as a substitute for cinnamon, which is obtained from genus Cinnamomum in family Lauraceae. Canella winterana is the only species known in cultivation.

The family is divided into five genera, but studies of DNA sequences have indicated one of these genera should be split. These genera together comprise about 25 species. In the Greater Antilles, many of these species are rare and restricted to small ranges. As of 2008, five of the species were newly recognized and not yet named.

  • These trees, rarely shrubs, are evergreen and glabrous.
  • The stems have nodes with three (rarely two) leaf gaps and three leaf traces. The xylem has narrow rays. The bark is aromatic, with prominent and unusual appearing lenticels.
  • The leaves have a peppery taste, are alternate, spiral, or distichous in arrangement, simple, entire, coriaceous, petiolate, pinnately nerved, without stipules, with translucent (pellucid) glands. The parenchyma is without palisade layer in Pleodendron and Canella. The stomata are paracytic in American genera, and anomocytic in the Old World.
  • The inflorescences are terminal or axillary, in a panicle (Canella) or a raceme; otherwise, the flowers are solitary (by reduction) and axillary.
  • The flowers are actinomorphic, hypogynous, and usually trimerous. The receptacles are barely excavated, and the hypogynous disc is absent.
  • The three (rarely 2) sepals are thick, coriaceous, and imbricate.
  • The petals number (4-)5-12, in 1-2 (-4) unlike whorls or spirally arranged, slender, imbricate in bud, usually free (connate at the base in Canella and halfway to the apex in Cinnamosma).
  • The androecium is monadelphous, adnate to the ovary. Stamens number 6-12, apparently derived from the fusion of two whorls in Warburgia and Canella. Anthers are extrorse and bithecal, with two sporangia per theca, attached to the outside of the staminal tube, and sessile; dehiscence is by a longitudinal slit, connective not projecting beyond thecae or only slightly so.
  • The gynoecium is syncarpous. The ovary has two to six carpels, unilocular and superior. The style is short and thick; the stigma is apical and capitate, with two to six lobes. Placentation is parietal. Ovules number from two to many in one or two rows on each of the two to six placentas; they are hemianatropous to campylotropous, bitegmic, and crassinucellate.
  • The fruit is a berry with a persistent calyx, with two or more seeds. Cinnamosma macrocarpa, in the Madagascan genus Cinnamosma, has the largest fruit in the family, sometimes reaching by .
  • Seeds have exotestae (the outer layer of the testa) only; the tegmen (the inner layer of the testa) is collapsed. The seed coat has oily idioblasts; the endosperm is abundant and oily (ruminate in Cinnamosma). The embryo is small and straight to slightly curved, with two cotyledons.
  • Pollen occurs in monads, and is delicate and monosulcate (usually with 10% of the grain trichotomosulcate); apertures are distal, exine, generally tectate, and granular, intectate, and reticulate in Cinnamosma; grains are small and hardly ornamented in Cinnamodendron and Warburgia, largest and most highly decorated in Canella and Pleodendron. The pollen is generally similar to that of the Myristicaceae, which had at one time caused some systematists to believe the two families were closely related.
  • The chromosome number 2n is 22, 26, or 28.

Synapomorphies for Canellaceae include monadelphous stamens, parietal placentation, and campylotropous ovules. but small-scale, local production continues. The Canellaceae have long had local use as aromatic plants and as herbal medicines.

The bark of the red cinnamon or false Winter's bark, Cinnamodendron corticosum, is used as a substitute for Winter's bark (Drimys winteri, a member of Winteraceae) in Chile and Argentina, where it is called canelo, a name that is also applied to cinnamon. In Africa, several species of Warburgia have medicinal uses. The barks of Warburgia salutaris and Warburgia ugandensis are used to treat fevers, colds, and malaria. Other species are used for timber or in the production of resins used as glue.

Fossils

Fossil leaves of Canella are known from the Pliocene of Bahia (Brazil). Pollen of Pleodendron is known from the Oligocene of Puerto Rico.

Systematic position

Depending on the classification system and the characters considered, Canellaceae has been placed close to Annonaceae, Myristicaceae or Winteraceae. These two orders combined with another two sister-orders Laurales and Magnoliales form together the clade Magnoliids.

Included taxa

: Theoretical introduction to Taxonomy

In this article, the genus Capsicodendron is maintained in synonymy with Cinnamodendron, although preliminary molecular phylogenetic studies separate Capsicodendron from Cinnamodendron and place Capsicodendron closer to Cinnamosma and Warburgia than to Cinnamodendron. This placement is not corroborated by morphology. The currently recognized genera in Canellaeae can be distinguished as follows: He had probably reported the use of C. winterana. In 1753, in the first edition of Species Plantarum, Linnaeus divided Winterania into four species. Three of these are now in Cinnamomum, and the fourth, which he called Laurus winterana, consisted of what are now Canella winterana and Drimys winteri. These four species were included in a broadly defined Laurus.

In 1756, Patrick Browne applied the name Canella to the species now known as Canella winterana. He did not add a specific epithet to create a binomial. The generic name is derived from canela, the Spanish word for cinnamon, but the Spanish word is derived from the Latin canna, meaning "a reed", or from the related Greek kanna, which refers to a piece of rolled bark.

The genus Canella was not adopted by Linnaeus, who resurrected Winterania in the second edition of Species Plantarum in 1762. He assigned to Winterania a single species, Winterania canella, which was equivalent to the species he had previously called Laurus winterana.

In 1784, Johan Andreas Murray divided Winterania into two monospecific genera, the constituent species of which were Canella alba and Wintera aromatica. The name Canella alba was validated by Murray in 1784, Patrick Browne mentions its use by Mark Catesby. The name change was required by the rules of botanical nomenclature. Wintera aromatica is now known as Drimys winteri and is in the family Winteraceae.

The family Canellaceae was established by Carl von Martius in 1832 and was defined as consisting of only the genus Canella. Stephan Endlicher divided Canella in 1840, creating the new genus Cinnamodendron. Cinnamosma was erected in 1867, Warburgia in 1895, and Pleodendron in 1899. Capsicodendron was erected in 1933. Some authors accept Capsicodendron and assign to it two species, Capsicodendron pimenteira and Capsicodendron dinisii. Two other species in this group have not been formally named and described in the scientific literature.

References

Pictures

  • Flowers of Cinnamosma madagascariensis
  • Flowers of Canella winterana
  • Warburgia salutaris in fruit
  • Flowers of Cinnamodendron ekmanii

Words

  • Neotropical Canellaceae Family Index Neotropikey Projects and Programmes Tropical America Project Kew in depth Scientific Research and Data Kew Gardens
  • List of Genera in Canellaceae Dicotyledons List Genera within a Family Vascular Plant Families and Genera About the Checklist World Checklist of Selected Plant Families Data Sources ePIC Scientific Databases Kew Gardens
  • List of Genera in Canellaceae Canellaceae List of families Families and Genera in GRIN Queries GRIN taxonomy for plants
  • Canella winterana Canella Canellaceae Canellales Magnoliids Magnoliophyta (flowering plants) ... Embryophyta Streptophytina Streptophyta Viridiplantae Eukaryota Taxonomy UniProt
  • Canellaceae Volume 3 Family List FNA (Flora of North America) eFloras
  • Canellaceae Leslie Watson and Michael J. Dallwitz (1992 onwards), The families of flowering plants
  • NCBI Taxonomy Browser: Cannellaceae
  • Distribution Map Genus List Canellaceae Canellales Trees APweb botanical databases About Science & Conservation Missouri Botanical Garden
  • Canellaceae in BoDD – Botanical Dermatology Database
  • page xxxvii Flowering Plants (Takhtajan)
  • CRC World Dictionary of Plant Names: A-C <span style="color:green;">At:</span> Botany & Plant Science <span style="color:green;">At:</span> Life Science <span style="color:green;">At:</span> CRC Press
  • The search for cinnamon Gastronomica
  • page 488 Hortus Cliffortianus View Record for title 2450 Titles/H Titles Biodiversity Heritage Library
  • page 371 Species Plantarum, 1st ed. (1753) <span style="color:green;">At:</span> View Record of title 25 <span style="color:green;">At:</span> Titles by Carl von Linné (1707-1778) Authors / L Authors Biodiversity Heritage Library
  • Canella Plant Names IPNI
  • Canella The Civil and Natural History of Jamaica Patrick Browne Authors Botanicus
  • Samuel Dale Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900 Wikisource
  • page 636 Species Plantarum 2nd edition, volume 1 View Record for title 26 Titles by Carl von Linné (1707-1778) Authors / L Authors Biodiversity Heritage Library
  • Canella on page 443 Wintera on page 507 Systema Vegetabilium (1784) View Record Titles by Johann Andreas Murray Titles by Johan Anders Murray Authors/M Authors Biodiversity Heritage Library
  • page 373 page 374 De Fructibus et Seminibus Plantarum Joseph Gaertner Author List Botanicus Digital Library
  • Families CA-CL Indices Nominum Supragenericorum Plantarum Vascularium Home Page of James L. Reveal and C. Rose Broome
  • page 168 Nova genera et species plantarum, vol. 3 View Record for title 12 Titles by Karl Friedrich Philipp von Martius Authors Biodiversity Heritage Library
  • Antillodendron (search exact) Name Search Tropicos About Science and Conservation Missouri Botanical Garden