Tony and Michelle Avent started Plant Delights Nursery in 1986 with the desire to share new, rare, exciting, and native perennial plants at a time when most nurseries in the southeast offered a limited menu of common evergreens and annuals. The founding principle was to offer a large diversity of unique perennial plants that performed well in the zone 7b southeast climate. That meant the conventional route of ordering starter plants in bulk from large commercial growers was not an option for them, so they started propagating small quantities of plants from Tony’s collection and slowly increased production as the facilities grew. 

Today, our greenhouses are home to over 2,800 different plants with hundreds more grown in our outdoor production areas and the garden. While the current industry trend is to only grow and market plants that can be produced in a 3-6-month window, we focus on many of the incredible "left behind" plants that take many years to produce a saleable plant. Currently, our hybridization efforts are focused on Agave, Amorphophallus, Arisaema, Baptisia, Crinum, Epimedium, Farfugium, Mahonia, Mangave, Polygonatum, Rohdea, Trillium, and Yucca. From pollination to introduction, the process takes 3-10 years, depending on the genus and species. 

Since 1993, Tony has traveled across the United States and the world in search of new species with good garden merit, but also different and improved collections of species that were already known and cultivated. The key to finding suitable plants for our growing zone and climate is to understand how elevation and micro climates affect plant hardiness. Tropical plants from high elevations often prove to be much more winter hardy than the ones collected a couple of thousand feet lower. We also find plants in Florida that were moved there by glaciers thousands of years ago that have retained their winter hardy genetics. As exciting as world travel is, most of our botanizing expeditions did not require a passport. We have discovered many new species of native plants in very diverse areas of the US, with many still awaiting formal publication. 

On occasion we get the privilege of adopting or rescuing unique hybrids and rare species from retiring plant collectors. So far, we have been able to rescue collections from John Fellers (rain lilies) in 2009, Thad Howard (bulbs) in 2009, Phil Adams (lycoris) in 2012, Alan Galloway (aroids) in 2020, Victor Lambou (hymenocallis, Louisiana iris) in 2021, and the Flory/Flagg/Smith collection (rain lilies) in 2024. It takes a tremendous effort to pack, transport, organize, identify, tag, pot and grow these collections. You can learn more about our latest efforts by subscribing to the JLBG blog and following us on social media. 

Every plant we acquire gets evaluated in our research and trial beds for taxonomic accuracy, vigor, performance, and weediness. Only plants that pass our high standards get introduced to the public. To date we have introduced over 1,440 new plants to horticulture, including now widely available Allium ‘Millenium’, Eucomis comosa ‘Sparkling Burgundy’, and Illicium parviflorum ‘Florida Sunshine’. We believe propagation and widespread sharing of all plants, and especially those which are rare in their native habitat, is the best way to preserve those genetics in the face of constant climate change. By making our plants widely available, we hope to increase the genetic diversity of ornamental gardens and reduce collecting pressures on native plant populations. 

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