Pride of Barbados

Chinese holly (Ilex cornuta) is the only plant in this holly group that is not from here, and that is the first thing to say about it. It is native to eastern China and Korea, it is sold across the American South by the pallet, and Missouri Botanical Garden records plainly that "it has naturalized from garden plantings in North Carolina and Alabama". Kew's data adds introduced occurrences in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Louisiana, both Carolinas and Tennessee, and the mechanism is the plant's own selling point: birds eat the showy red drupes and carry the seed into woodland edges. On its merits it is a genuinely tough broadleaf evergreen - 8 to 15 feet each way, heat and drought tolerant, deer-proof, comfortable in city conditions, and carrying the most distinctive leaf in the genus, a stiff rectangular blade to four inches with three big spines at the blunt end rather than the wavy spined outline of English holly. The catch beyond the escape risk is cold: it is zone 7 to 9, and Missouri Botanical Garden says flatly that "winter hardiness is a significant problem in St. Louis". Set against inkberry, yaupon and possumhaw in this batch, it is the one whose wildlife value stops at the fruit.

An upright, multi-stemmed, suckering deciduous shrub in the olive family, grown for its intensely fragrant mid-to-late-spring (May) bloom of lilac-purple flowers in large conical panicles. Native to southeastern Europe and cultivated in North America since the early 1600s, it matures to 12 to 16 feet tall with blue-green, pointed-ovate to heart-shaped leaves. It needs cold winters and cool summers - and offers few ornamental features after bloom, with leggy form, no fall color, and summer powdery mildew.

A deciduous European hedgerow shrub or small tree grown above all for one of the most arresting autumn shows of any native woody plant - rosy-pink, four-lobed fruit capsules that split to reveal vivid orange-coated seeds, hanging against red-purple foliage. Native across Europe and into western Asia (POWO, Kew), it is a tough, undemanding plant for hedgerows and informal screens that genuinely earns its keep for wildlife: insect-pollinated flowers in spring, seeds taken by birds, and aphid colonies that feed ladybirds and hoverflies. The honest pitch, and it is load-bearing: every part of this plant is toxic if eaten and the colourful fruit is especially so, so it must be sited away from where children might be tempted; it is also a primary winter host of the black bean aphid, so keep it well clear of a vegetable plot. With those two caveats respected, it is a dependable, wildlife-rich native - chosen for honest autumn drama, not for being trouble-free.

Fraser photinia is a large evergreen hybrid shrub bred at Fraser Nurseries in Alabama in the 1940s by crossing the Japanese Photinia glabra with the Chinese P. serratifolia; it has no wild native range. Its brilliant scarlet new growth, produced in flushes from spring through summer, made it one of the most planted hedging shrubs in the UK and southeastern US. The honest catch is Entomosporium leaf spot (Entomosporium maculatum): in humid climates this fungal disease causes progressive defoliation and can kill established plants over several seasons, making sustained dense hedging unreliable without repeated fungicide intervention or very good airflow.

A large, suckering deciduous shrub or small multi-stemmed tree native to China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan (and reported east to the Philippines), grown for its intensely fragrant white star-flowers in late summer - each cradled in a green calyx that flushes crimson as the season turns - followed by startling turquoise-blue berries against a vivid red star. It delivers one of the most theatrical autumn displays in the garden and draws bees, butterflies and moths to its late nectar. The honest catch is a relentless suckering habit: established plants send up a spreading thicket of root shoots that must be pulled or mown season after season, and in the warmer parts of its cultivated range it can self-seed enough to be treated as locally invasive.

Japanese privet is a dense evergreen shrub native to central and southern Japan (Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu, Okinawa) and Korea, widely planted across zones 7-10 as a fast-growing hedge and screen. Its glossy, dark-green waxy foliage and tolerance of heavy clipping make it a workhorse for privacy planting, and fragrant white panicles in late spring to early summer are a bonus. The honest catch is threefold: all parts - especially the purple-black berries that ripen from autumn into winter - are toxic to people, dogs, cats, and horses; the plant has become a documented invasive across roughly 11 south-eastern US states where it escapes cultivation into woodland edges; and its dense, fast growth can outcompete surrounding plantings if not clipped regularly.