Avocado, black pepper, nutmeg and cinnamon all belong to one ancient plant group
Your spice rack and your guacamole share a family secret. Avocado, black pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon, bay laurel and the magnolia tree all belong to the magnoliids, a branch of flowering plants with more than 10,000 species whose lineage split from the rest perhaps 135 million years ago, or even earlier.
After the eudicots and monocots, the magnoliids are the third-largest group of flowering plants. Their flowers tend to have parts in threes, their pollen has a single pore and their leaves usually have branching veins. Some members rank among the earliest flowering plants and still show features reminiscent of conifers, such as stamens that resemble the scales of male cones. Molecular clocks put the split from other plants at about 135 million years ago, or possibly 160 to 165 million.
Naming them has been messy. Different botanists have used Magnoliidae for anything from this group alone to every dicot, which is why many researchers prefer the informal word magnoliids. Under the PhyloCode the clade now covers four orders, including the laurels, magnolias and peppers.
Food history runs through the group. Farmers in Mexico and Central America have likely tended avocados for close to 10,000 years, the crop probably starting around Chiapas or Guatemala, and early Central Americans also first grew soursop, sugar-apple and cherimoya. Sassafras oil once flavoured root beer until the United States and Canada banned its key compound, safrole, as a food additive in 1960 after it caused liver damage and tumours in mice.
The chemistry cuts both ways. Kava, made from the roots of a pepper relative, is drunk across the Pacific to relax; nutmeg's myristicin can cause hallucinations and days of nausea in large amounts; and the Cofán people of Colombia and Ecuador tip hunting arrows with a paralysing extract from Chlorocardium venenosum. On the helpful side, sailors chewed Winter's Bark against scurvy, magnolia bark compounds show antibacterial action against the microbes behind tooth decay and bad breath, and acetogenins from the custard-apple family are under study for anti-tumour and anti-malarial effects. Ylang-ylang perfume comes from the flowers of Cananga odorata.
Source: Magnoliids
