2024 Volume 99 Issue 2 Pages 85-91
Angelica tianmuensis Z.H.Pan & T.D.Zhuang is a little-known and endangered species distributed in northern Zhejiang, China. The plants of the species are cultivated as Ligusticum sinense Oliv. at the Tokyo Metropolitan Medicinal Plants Garden and were distributed to several Medicinal Plant Gardens in Japan including Iwate Medicinal University. The cultivated plants at the Iwate Medicinal University were examined in morphological and genetic analyses, and are referred to A. tianmuensis, not L. sinense. The cultivar of the Tokyo Metropolitan Medicinal Plants Garden was originally introduced from Lushan Botanical Garden, Jiangxi, China through the seed exchange program in 1982. Identification of the plant was, therefore, traced by examination of images of herbarium specimens of L. sinense collected near Lushan, Jiangxi Province, from Chinese Virtual Herbarium. Several specimens of A. tianmuensis were included among those determined as L. sinense. This indicates that A. tianmuensis may possibly be cultivated as L. sinense in Lushan and that the species occurs not only in Tianmu Mountain in Zhejiang but also in Lushan in Jiangxi.
