Barbeuia madagascariensis is a liana found only on the island of Madagascar.
Barbeuia has occasionally been placed in its own family, Barbeuiaceae. The APG II system of 2003, for instance, recognizes such a family and assigns it to the order Caryophyllales in the clade core eudicots, after Philippe Cuénoud sequenced a fragment of the matK gene (extracted from a seed deposited in the Kew Herbarium) and showed that Barbeuia does not belong in Phytolaccaceae. This represents a change from the APG system, of 1998, which did not recognize Barbeuiaceae as a family, for lack of molecular data.