Since its original publication in 1789, Vaccinium virgatum has been treated by most authors as an accepted species in V. sect. Cyanococcus. In the latest comprehensive taxonomic treatment of the section, however, it is treated as a synonym of the broadly circumscribed species V. corymbosum. Here we use morphology and estimation of ploidy level with flow cytometry in combination with previously published phylogenomic analysis based on high-throughput DNA sequencing to support the taxonomic status of V. virgatum as a species to be recognized. As circumscribed here, V. virgatum occurs in the southeastern U.S. Coastal Plain from Arkansas and Texas to northeastern Florida and South Carolina. An updated taxonomic treatment of the species, including an expanded description, distribution map by county, and a representative list of specimens examined by county is included. We provide a means of distinguishing V. virgatum from V. ashei, a similar species recently also segregated from V. corymbosum, and from presumed rabbiteye blueberry escapes from cultivation, which can occur both within and outside of the native range of V. virgatum. We designate a neotype for V. virgatum and lectotypes for V. virgatum vars. angustifolium, parvifolium, and speciosum.

The Angiosperms353 v1 target capture kit (Johnson et al., 2019) was used for targeted enrichment of each sample.Raw sequences were filtered and processed with the Trim Galore wrapper script (v.0.6.5) to trim adapters and low-quality reads based on a given Phred quality score cutoff (-q 20). Consensus read assembly for target loci was performed with the default settings in HybPiper v2. Supercontig sequences (introns + exons) were assembled in HybPiper. Following alignment of individual loci with MAFFT, columns with >50% missing data were removed, and concatenated. Vaccinium macrocarpon ("V_macrocarpon_CY234") serves as the outgroup sample.