Name: Rosaceae
Meaning of Name:
Rosaceae, from Latin rosa (‘rose’) + Latin -āceae (the feminine plural of -āceus, ‘resembling’, a suffix used to form the taxonomic family names of plants, algae, bacteria, and fungi)
Common Name:
The rose family
Botanical Information:
Rosaceae, or the rose family, contains over 90 genera and just over 4,500 species. Most are perennial and deciduous shrubs and trees, but the family is very broad and includes evergreens, climberz, and perennial and annual herbaceous species.
This is an economically important family with many fruit and ornamental plants. The ornamentals include the roses and photonias, and the fruits include almond, peach, plum, pear, apple, rspberry, blackberry and strawberry cultivars.
The genus Rosa is the type genus, or the one which defines a biological family and which gives the family its name.
Nowadays the Rosaceae family is defined phylogenetically by three subfamilies: Rosoideae, Amygdaloideae, and Dryadoideae.
The photo chosen to illustrate this family shows the flower of a rose (Rosa sp.).
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