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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:
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(0.06¢/key line)
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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 Berberidaceae

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1 Leaves 2-3-ternately compound; [subfamily Nandinoideae].
  2 Plant a shrub, with multiple leaves; flowers white
  2 Plant an herb, with 2 leaves; flowers green, greenish yellow, or maroon
1 Leaves simple (sometimes shallowly to deeply lobed), 2-foliolate, 3-foliolate, or 1-pinnately compound.
    3 Plant a shrub; leaves simple, palmately 3-foliolate, or 1-pinnately compound; flowers yellow; [subfamily Berberidoideae]
      4 Leaves simple, fascicled on short spur shoots; stems spiny; leaves deciduous or evergreen
      4 Leaves 1-pinnately compound or palmately 3-foliolate, either fascicled on short spur shoots (Alloberberis) or not fascicled (Mahonia); stems not spiny; leaves evergreen.
image of plant
Show caption*© Sonnia Hill
        5 Leaves palmately 3-foliolate; stems dimorphic (leaves fascicled on short shoots); berries red
image of plant
Show caption*© Keith Bradley
        5 Leaves 1-pinnately compound; stems monomorphic (leaves borne on primary shoots); berries blue or black
    3 Plant an herb; leaves peltate, 2-parted or radially lobed; flowers white; [subfamily Podophylloideae].
          6 Plant acaulescent; flower solitary and scapose; leaf segments 2; fruit a capsule
          6 Plant caulescent; flower solitary, or cymose to umbellate, borne on a stem with leaves; leaf segments several; fruit a berry.
             7 Flowers cymose or umbellate; stamens 6; berry globose, 8-12 mm long, 2-4 seeded; larger leaves with only 2 clefts that extend > halfway to the peltate center of the leaf (thus the leaf divided into 2 halves, the other sinuses shallow)
             7 Flower solitary; stamens 12-18; berry ovoid, 25-70 mm long, many-seeded; larger leaves with 5 or more clefts that extend > halfway to the peltate center of the leaf (thus the leaf fairly evenly divided into multiple lobes)