Quaking grass

Red fescue is the fescue in this catalog that is a lawn before it is an ornament. It is a low, fine-leaved, slowly spreading perennial grass with a circumboreal native range covering most of Europe, Siberia, China, Japan, Korea and most of the United States and Canada, and it is one of the most widely sown turf and revegetation grasses in the world. Two facts about buying it matter more than anything in the description. First, almost nothing is sold as the plain species. Wikipedia records many subspecies and many cultivars bred for the horticulture trade, and the two a gardener actually meets behave differently: creeping red fescue, subsp. rubra, is the one the common name refers to, while Chewings fescue, subsp. commutata, is a bunch grass that does not run at all. Habit here is a subspecies property, not a species property, so a bag labelled red fescue does not by itself tell you whether the grass will knit. Second, the sources disagree about light, and the disagreement is informative rather than sloppy. The Royal Horticultural Society says to grow it in full sun, describing an ornamental clump for a gravel garden or a meadow. Wikipedia says it prefers shadier areas and is often planted for its shade tolerance, describing why it is in every shade lawn mix on the shelf. Both are accurate about the plant they are describing. What is not in dispute is the low-input case: the RHS flags it drought resistant, asks for poor to moderately fertile well-drained soil, and rates it generally pest-free and disease-free. The limits are just as plain. Chewings fescue is recorded as not particularly tolerant of heavy wear or of mowing closer than 0.2 inches, and red fescue has never been a forage grass because its productivity and palatability are low. Read it as the fescue for a lawn, a bank or an unmown carpet on poor soil. Sheep fescue (Festuca ovina) and Idaho fescue (Festuca idahoensis) in this same group are clumping grasses for ornament and restoration, and blue fescue (Festuca glauca) is a blue mound for a rockery. Only this one is turf.

A drought-hardy western-native subshrub (long known as Zauschneria) that lights up dry, rocky ground with scarlet tubular flowers from midsummer until frost - exactly when migrating and resident hummingbirds need a late-season nectar source. Slender, highly-branched stems carry small grey-green lance-shaped leaves; the whole plant thrives on full sun, lean soil, and very little water once established.

A spring-blooming native bulb of the moist meadows of the Pacific Northwest and northern Rockies, common camas sends up a 2-3 foot scape lined with dozens of star-shaped blue-violet florets that open from the bottom up over basal grass-like leaves. It is the camas whose bulb was a staple food of Indigenous peoples across its range - the genus name comes from the Native American "kamas"/"quamash". The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center flags it as a plant of special value to native bees.

Creeping cotoneaster is a deciduous spreading shrub native to the mountains of central and southwestern China, Nepal, and Taiwan, prized for its distinctive flat herringbone branching, tiny pink-white summer flowers, and masses of vivid red autumn berries that sustain birds through winter. It holds the RHS Award of Garden Merit and tolerates poor, dry soils on banks and walls where little else will perform. The honest catch is twofold: the berries are mildly toxic to humans and pets (cyanogenic seeds, GI-irritant flesh), and the plant self-seeds freely enough that it is naturalising widely in the UK and Ireland and is considered potentially invasive - a real concern before planting near wild margins or hedgerows.

A tough, clump-forming herbaceous perennial whose common name comes from its bloom habit - each flower opens for a single day, but a well-budded scape opens fresh blooms in succession over weeks. Modern garden daylilies are overwhelmingly hybrids, with more than 60,000 cultivars registered, in nearly every color but true blue. Full-size classics like 'Hyperion' carry fragrant, 4-inch flowers on naked scapes rising to about 3 feet above arching, blade-like foliage; the plants tolerate rabbits, erosion, and urban conditions and ask very little once established.

The classic cottage-garden columbine of Europe, also called granny's bonnet - an airy clump-forming perennial whose ferny blue-green foliage carries nodding, intricately spurred flowers (classically blue-violet, but freely variable in colour and form) in late spring. Native across Europe (POWO, Kew), it is a quintessential cottage plant that self-seeds prolifically and hybridises freely, so it pops up everywhere and named forms rarely come true from seed. It is fairly short-lived - a few years per plant - and leans on that self-sowing to persist. Every part is toxic if eaten, the seeds and roots most of all, so it is decorative only. RHS holds it fully hardy (H7) and has given several Aquilegia vulgaris forms the Award of Garden Merit.