Aspidostemon
Aspidostemon is a genus of flowering plants belonging to the family Lauraceae. It occurs in Madagascar. Taxonomy The genus was described by Jens Gunter Rohwer & Hans Georg Richter in Jahrbuch für Botanische Systematik, Pflanzengeschichte und Pflanzengeographie 109 (1): 74 in 1987. The type species is Aspidostemon perrieri (Danguy) Rohwer. The number of collections available is not large. The identification was done at the Missouri Botanical Garden. Description They are shrubs or trees up to 25 m high, hermaphrodites. The leaves are entire, elliptical or narrowly elliptical. The fruit is a berry-like drupe dispersed mostly by birds. Aspidostemon species are no exception among the Lauraceae; they are trees with small flowers, hard to detect and collect and often overlooked or ignored when plants easier to collect or with showier flowers are at hand. Aspidostemon is characterized by its opposite leaves, flowers with three or six stamens (compared to 9 in Cryptocarya), and a fruit which is completely enclosed in the enlarged hypanthium with persistent floral parts attached to the top of the fruit. When the genus was described by Rohwer & Richter in 1987, they recognized 11 species, but today 28 species are accepted. Some species are endangered or almost