italicized species names in a Rmarkdown distill package

[Bendlexane]

Hi!

I'm feeling dummy but I haven't found any valuable resource to this problem and gpts seems to do not know the answer either. I also searched in past issues too without success.

`---
title: "On the usage of the species Lavandula in Europe"
text: !expr htmltools::em("Lavandula")
description: |
A new article created using the Distill format.
author:

• name: Nora Jones
  url: https://example.com/norajones
  affiliation: Spacely Sprockets
  affiliation_url: https://example.com/spacelysprokets
  date: "r Sys.Date()"
  output: distill::distill_article
  ---`

I just want to italicize Lavandula in the title of the distill document and appear properly written in the html Rmarkdown document for a written report. I had also problems to include the mails of authors in the beginnig of the documents.

How can I solve the problem?
Hope this will serve to other scholars

Thank you in advance