Asparagus

An upright, clump-forming perennial of the mint family native to the upper Midwest, Great Plains, and into central Canada, named for its anise-scented foliage. From June through September it carries dense terminal spikes of lavender-to-purple two-lipped flowers above square stems and opposite, toothed leaves. The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center flags it as a nectar source with special value to native bees, bumble bees, and honey bees, and it also draws butterflies and hummingbirds.

A tough, deep-rooted perennial in the daisy family (Asteraceae), grown for both its sky-blue summer flowers and its many edible uses. Native to Europe and now widely naturalized along roadsides and in fields across North America, chicory sends up wiry, branching stems 3 to 4 feet tall from a long, stout taproot. The ray flowers are a clear sky-blue (occasionally white or pink), opening in the morning and closing again by midday. The same plant gives three classic harvests: bitter young leaves for cooking and salads, a roasted taproot used as a caffeine-free coffee substitute or additive, and forced, blanched shoots known as 'chicons' (Belgian endive / witloof). It thrives on poor, dry, sunny ground where pampered plants would not, and its deep taproot makes it genuinely drought-tolerant once established.

A terrestrial bromeliad grown for its sweet, golden, edible fruit - the abacaxi of warm Brazil. POWO records it as South American in origin, its precise wild range obscured by ancient domestication, and Flora e Funga do Brasil documents Ananas in Brazil. The plant forms a low rosette of stiff, sword-shaped leaves, many forms armed with sharply toothed margins, from the centre of which a single stout stem rises bearing a dense cone of small purple flowers. Those flowers fuse together into the familiar multiple fruit (a syncarp), topped by a leafy crown that can itself be rooted to grow another plant. HONESTY: this is a frost-tender tropical, hardy in the ground only in roughly USDA zones 10a-11b, and it is slow - a plant takes well over a year from planting to a ripe fruit. Commercial clones are largely self-incompatible and, kept isolated from other clones, set the seedless fruit prized in the kitchen.

A long-lived clump-forming perennial vegetable grown for its thick, tart leaf stalks (petioles), which range from deep red to pink to green and are used in sauces, jams, and pies. Bold, heart-shaped dark green leaves rise 2 to 3 feet over a wide crown, and tall whitish flower panicles appear from late spring into summer. The leaf blades are NOT edible - they carry toxic levels of oxalic acid - only the stalks are eaten.

A tropical rhizomatous herbaceous perennial in the ginger family, grown the world over for the thick branched rhizomes that - boiled, dried, and ground - become the bright yellow-orange spice. The foliage clump rises 3 to 4 feet in canna-like, pleated, lanceolate-to-elliptic green leaves up to 3.3 feet long, topped in summer by short dense spikes of pale yellow flowers among pinkish bracts. The flowers are sterile, so the plant is propagated entirely from rhizome division.

The classic cottage-garden "pink" - an evergreen, mat-forming perennial in the pink family grown for centuries for its intensely clove-scented, fringed (feather-edged) flowers above a low cushion of narrow, grassy, blue-grey foliage. POWO (Kew) gives its native range as the eastern Alps and the mountains of central and southeastern Europe. It thrives in full sun and lean, sharply drained, neutral-to-alkaline soil and is hardy in USDA zones 3a-9b. The parent of the old garden pinks, it earns the RHS Award of Garden Merit and is prized for fragrance, drought tolerance, and tidy sunny edging.