Star anise’s job moonlighting as Tamiflu caught my eye because star anise is in a group of plant families with a very interesting pedigree.
It is in the Illiciaceae (Ill-ik-ee-ay’-see-ay), a small family whose members are all in one genus – Illicium. There are only about 40 species in the whole family (the pea family, for comparison, contains about 20,000), and their most distinctive characteristic are those beautiful star-shaped fruits, like the brown whorl at left.
They are woody trees or shrubs with shiny simple evergreen leaves and special spherical ethereal oil cells (full of anethole, in this case) in the bark, leaves and (obviously) fruit. Like retirees and Mexican drug-lords, they seem to prefer life in the tropics and sub-tropics.
The Illicaceae was only the second family of flowering plants I learned in plant taxonomy because it belongs in a very loose group that seem to have split off from the rest of the flowering plants very soon after flowers evolved. Informally called the “basal angiosperms” (angiosperm being the science nerd name for flowering plant — look for Illicium in the Austrobaileyales on the tree) or paleodicots, scientists agree they parted ways with the rest of the flowering plants early on, but aren’t necessarily closely related to each other at all. They’re more like a bunch of toddlers who wandered away from the same birthday party: they are connected in at least one basic way, some of them may be closely related, but they can only *sorta* tell us where they came from and who they belong to.
What makes the families in this group interesting is that many of them seem to retain the characteristics botanists traditionally considered to be those of the first flowering plants: woody, evergreen, many-petaled, tropcial or semi-tropical. Several, like Illicium, have scattered ethereal oil cells that make them good spices. In addition to star anise, you’ll recognize many of McCormick’s Greatest Hits here: the family Lauraceae (all plant families end in -aceae) contains Laurus nobilis, Cinnamomum verum, and C. camphora, the sources of bay leaves, cinnamon, and camphor. Piperaceae contains Piper nigrum, the source of black and white pepper. Myristicaceae contains the beautifully-named Myristica fragrans – nutmeg and mace.
The fruit of Myristica fragrans. The brown nut-like object is the source of nutmeg, while the red alien-goo that looks to be devouring it is the source of the spice mace. True story! Image by Mila Zinkova, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License. Click image for link.
But how do we know that woody evergreen plants with flowers with lots of separate parts are similar to the first flowers?
Well, we don’t for absolute certain, though botanists felt it was true for many years. In fact, recent evidence may be challenging that view. But there are many clues these plants did indeed split from the flowering plants early on. And I’ll tell you about them — and a little about what we know about the first flowering plants — next time.
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