Castela (Simaroubaceae), an impressive New World radiation of thorny shrubs destined for edaphically dry habitats

This is a morphological character matrix and plastome dataset for 15 of the 16 species species of the genus Castela and outgroups. Morphological characters were reconstructed across our plastome phylogeny to determine the evolutionary history of major morphological characters in the genus. A reduced atpB, matK, rbcL dataset also is included, which was used to test the phylogenetic position of Castela retusa.