London plane tree (Platanus acerifolia Willd.) is an important member of the Platanaceae family, being popular as an urban landscaping tree. Here, we report the isolation of five MADS-box genes from the basal angiosperm, Platanus acerifolia. Sequence and phylogenetic analyses identified FRUITFUL-like, APETELA3-like, AGAMOUS-like, SEPALLATA1-like and SEPALLATA3-like sequences and, hence, we term the respective Platanus acerifolia genes as PlacFUL, PlacAP3, PlacAG, PlacSEP1 and PlacSEP3. From these identities we infer that they represent candidate A-, B-, C-class and two E-class genes, respectively. The conserved MIK or MIKC domains from the nucleotide and protein sequences of PlacFUL, PlacAP3, PlacAG, PlacSEP1 and PlacSEP3 were analyzed using the maximum-likelihood, MrBayes and neighbor-joining methods. The results confirmed P. acerifolia as a basal eudicot. Expression pattern was determined by reverse transcriptase PCR, which showed all paralogous genes have distinct expression patterns, suggesting that they had undergone functional divergence.