Colors

Data mode

Account

Login
Sign up

Collapse this

Support the Flora of the Southeastern US

2024 has been a banner year for making the best flora we can imagine. We've created:
With financial support from people like you, we are aiming even higher in 2025. Together we can accomplish all this: Vote on our 2025 priorities
  • Add Global Conservation Ranks (GRanks) vote
  • Professional graphic keys (polyclaves) to individual families/genera vote
  • 2 new FloraQuest apps: Florida & Mid-South vote
  • Image overlays highlighting diagnostic characters with arrows vote
  • iNaturalist integration in FloraQuest vote
Write-in vote: vote
We've set a goal of recruiting 200 ongoing supporters to donate $15 or more each month in 2025. Please help us reach this goal and make next year's flora even better:

Click the number at the start of a key lead to highlight both that lead and its corresponding lead. Click again to show only the two highlighted leads. Click a third time to return to the full key with the selected leads still highlighted.

Key to Lauraceae

Copy permalink to share

1 Twining vines (orange, yellow, or greenish); leaves reduced to scales
1 Shrubs or trees; leaves present and well-developed.
  2 Leaves deciduous; flowers unisexual; [tribe Laureae].
    3 Some of the leaves with 1-2 (-5) rounded lobes; small to medium trees
    3 None of the leaves lobed; medium to large shrubs.
      4 Leaves 4-16 cm long, 2-6 cm wide, obovate, ovate, or broadly elliptic
      4 Leaves 1.2-4 cm long, 0.5-1.5 (-1.9) cm wide, narrowly elliptic
  2 Leaves evergreen; flowers bisexual; [tribe Perseeae].
        5 Leaf surfaces glabrous, bright green; leaf venation 3-nerved from at or near the base of the blade; crushed leaves with the odor of camphor
          6 Leaves with 3 parallel veins (these with 0-2 obvious lateral veins); principal vein axils with yellow, thickened, and pubescent domatia on the lower surface of the leaf; buds with bud scales
          6 Leaves pinnately veined (the 2 lateral veins with obvious and 3 or more lateral veins); principal vein axils lacking domatia; buds lacking bud scales
        5 Leaf surfaces pubescent to glabrate or glabrous, dark to medium green; leaf venation strongly pinnate; principal vein axils lacking yellow domatia; crushed fresh leaves with the odor of bay.
image of plant
Show caption*© Dutta Roy Sagnik, some rights reserved (CC BY), uploaded by Dutta Roy Sagnik
             7 Leaves mostly more than 15 cm long; drupe > 5 cm long
             7 Leaves less than 15 cm long; drupe < 3 cm long.
image of plant
Show caption*© Gary P. Fleming
               8 Leaf lower surface moderately to densely pubescent with ascending or appressed hairs (in some species these so appressed or small as to need 10× magnification to reliably detect); fruiting pedicel and cupule remaining tan or turning somewhat reddish; [collectively widespread in the Coastal Plain and rarely more inland provinces]
               8 Leaf lower surface glabrous; fruiting cupule and/or pedicel turning bright red at maturity; [of s. peninsular FL only].
                 9 Fruiting cupule not flanged; fertile stamens 9 (+ 3 glandular staminodes), the anthers 4-celled
                 9 Fruiting cupule with a prominent circumferential flange near the rim; fertile stamens 3 (+ 3 glandular staminodes), the anthers 2-celled