L. ARALIACEÆ.
Trees, shrubs, or herbs, with watery juice and scaly buds. Leaves alternate, compound or simple, petiolate, with stipules. Flowers in racemose or panicled umbels; parts of the flower in 5’s; disk epigynous; ovule solitary, suspended from the apex of the cell, anatropous; raphe ventral, the micropyle superior. Fruit baccate. Seeds, with albumen.
The Aralia family with fifty-four genera is chiefly tropical, with a few genera extending beyond the tropics into the northern hemisphere, especially into North America and eastern Asia. The widely distributed and largely extratropical genus Aralia is represented by one arborescent species in the flora of the United States. Hedera, the Ivy, of this family, is commonly cultivated in the temperate parts of the United States, and some species of Panax and Acanthopanax from eastern Asia are found in gardens in the northeastern states.