Magnoliaceae Juss.

Trees or shrubs, evergreen or deciduous, usually with perfect flowers, rarely dioecious, monoecious, or andro-dioecious, usually with trichomes or rarely glabrous. Vegetative buds enclosed by hooded stipules. Stipules 2, connate and adnate to or free from petiole, splitting and caducous but with a remaining annular scar on twig or if adnate to petiole with scar on petiole. Leaves simple, spirally arranged, rarely distichous, sometimes fascicled on twig apex and becoming pseudoverticillate, petiolate; leaf blade pinnately veined, margin entire or rarely lobed. Flowers terminal or terminal on axillary brachyblasts, solitary, large, insect pollinated. Spathaceous bracts 1 to several, basal to tepals. Tepals 6-9(-45), in 2 to many whorls, 3(-6) per whorl, usually fleshy, sometimes outer ones (perules) nearly leathery or reduced and sepal-like. Carpels and stamens many, distinct, spirally arranged on an elongated torus. Androecium usually at basal part of torus; filaments thick and short, sometimes elongated; connective usually exserted and forming a long or short tip; anthers linear, with 2 thecae, introrsely, laterally, or rarely extrorsely longitudinally dehiscing. Gynoecium at apical part of torus, sessile or with a gynophore; carpels folded, usually distinct, sometimes connate at base or rarely completely connate; ovules 2-14 per carpel, in 2 series on ventral sutures. Fruit apocarpous or sometimes syncarpous; mature carpels usually dehiscing along dorsal and/or ventral sutures, rarely connate and irregularly dehiscing or (in Liriodendron) indehiscent, samaroid, and adnate to seed endotesta. Seeds 1-12 per fruiting carpel, pendulous on a filiform elastic funiculus, exserted from mature carpels; testa fleshy, red; endotesta bony; embryo minute; endosperm copious, oily.