Boraginales

Boraginales is an order of flowering plants in the asterid clade. It includes the Boraginaceae and a number of other families, with a total of about 125 genera and 2,700 species. Its herbs, shrubs, trees and lianas (vines) have a worldwide distribution. The classification of plants now known as Boraginales dates to the Genera plantarum (1789) when Antoine Laurent de Jussieu named a group of plants Boragineae, to include the genus Borago, now the type genus. However, since the first valid description was by Friedrich von Berchtold and Jan Svatopluk Presl (1820), the botanical authority is given as Juss. ex Bercht. & J.Presl, where the ex refers to the prior authority of Jussieu. Lindley (1853) changed the name to the modern Boraginaceae. Jussieu divided the Boragineae into five groups. Since then Boraginaceae has been treated either as a large family with several subfamilies, or as a smaller family with several closely related families. The family had been included in a number of higher order taxa, but in 1926 Hutchinson erected a new order, Boraginales, to include the Boraginaceae. Although Boraginales was included in a number of taxonomic classifications including Dahlgren (1980), Takhtajan (1997) and Kubitzki (2016) as an order, it was not recognized in either of two major systems, the Cronquist system and the APG system. In the Cronquist system, Boraginaceae (including Cordiaceae, Ehretiaceae, and Heliotropiaceae) and Lennoaceae were placed in the order Lamiales, while the related Hydrophyllaceae was placed in Solanales. The APG system took a broad view of Boraginaceae (Boraginaceae s.l.), including within it the traditionally recognized families Hydrophyllaceae and Lennoaceae based on recent molecular phylogenies that show that Boraginaceae, as traditionally defined, is paraphyletic over these two families. APG III included Boraginaceae in the Euasterid I (lamiid) clade but this family was otherwise unplaced; its precise relationship to other families in the Euasterid I group remained unclear.