Tony Avent

Plant Delights @ Juniper Level Botanic Garden · Research

Liriopogons is a name used for cultivated genera of Liriope and Ophiopogon, Ruscaceae. Liriopogons are the most important clonal groundcovers sold by the nursery industry in the southeastern United States. Accurate segregation and identification of cultivars is difficult as cultivar descriptions used in nursery catalogs, literature, and plant paten...

Liriope Lour. and Ophiopogon Ker Gawl., collectively known as liriopogons, represent important evergreen groundcovers grown throughout the world for their ornamental features and medicinal qualities. As a result of the diversity of desirable traits and evidence of wide hybridization, there is considerable potential for breeding and improvement of l...

Using cheilanthoid ferns, we provide an example of how DNA barcoding approaches can be useful to the horticultural community for keeping plants in the trade accurately identified. We use plastid rbcL, atpA, and trnG-R sequence data to demonstrate that a fern marketed as Cheilanthes wrightii (endemic to the southwestern USA and northern Mexico) in t...