Mustard greens

A tender, tuberous-rooted morning-glory relative native to tropical America and cultivated for its starchy edible storage roots for over 2,000 years. Trailing stems mound only about 9 inches tall but sprawl 8 to 10 feet wide, rooting at the nodes, with heart-shaped to palmately-lobed leaves. The species occasionally bears pale-pink-to-violet trumpet flowers, though most cultivars rarely bloom. Winter hardy only to USDA Zones 9-11, it is grown as a warm-season annual everywhere colder.

Lemon thyme (Thymus × citriodorus) is a low, mat-forming evergreen sub-shrub grown for its small leaves that release a bright, distinctly lemony scent alongside the usual warm thyme aroma. It stays under a hand-span tall, spreads into a fragrant carpet, and carries pink to lavender flowers in mid to late summer that bees and butterflies work hard. It is a kitchen herb first, excellent in cooking and teas, and a tough, drought-tolerant edging or paving plant second. Its taxonomy is genuinely unsettled: long treated as a garden hybrid of common thyme, more recent work disputes whether it is a hybrid or a distinct species, and sources disagree on whether it has any wild native range, so Plotwright records it as a cultivated plant without a mapped wild distribution.

A leafy cool-season salad green in the daisy family (Asteraceae), grown as an annual (sometimes biennial) for its mildly bitter, edible rosette of leaves. NC State Extension describes an erect, rapid-growing plant about 10 inches to 24 inches tall, with two main leaf forms: the narrow, curly, dark-green leaves of the frisée types (var. crispum) and the broad, flat leaves of escarole (var. latifolium). It is native to the eastern Mediterranean and India and grows best at cool temperatures around 60 to 65°F, finishing a crop in about 70-100 days. The leaves are eaten raw or cooked, and growers often blanch the heads to soften the natural bitterness before harvest.

A cool-season leafy green eaten raw or lightly cooked - among the most fundamental garden vegetables. Bolts (sends up flower stalks) + turns bitter in heat above 70°F per NC State; cool-spring + cool-fall windows are the productive growing periods in most North American climates. Four habit groups: head (iceberg, crisphead), loose-leaf, romaine (cos), and butterhead (Bibb, Boston).

A fast, cool-season leafy annual grown for its tender, vitamin-rich basal rosette of leaves - an excellent source of vitamins A, B, and C plus iron and phosphorus per the Missouri Botanical Garden. Cultivated in Europe since the 1400s and probably native to western Asia, it crops best in the cool temperatures of spring and fall and bolts (sends up greenish-yellow flower spikes of no ornamental value) once summer heat arrives, after which the leaves deteriorate.

A tender warm-season culinary herb native to tropical Africa and Asia; grown as an annual in most US climates for fragrant edible leaves and as a kitchen-garden staple. Sweet basil is the species behind Genovese, Thai, and most ornamental purple basils.