A large multi-stemmed native shrub-to-small-tree of western North America, named for the dusty powder-blue drupes that ripen in late summer over a waxy bloom. Flat-topped creamy-white flower cymes up to 10 inches across rise above pinnately compound serrated foliage in early summer, drawing birds and butterflies. The cooked fruit is edible and prized for jelly, pie, and wine, but the plant earns a "high maintenance" note for suckering, wind/snow breakage, and a roster of fungal and insect pests.

The hardiest and largest of the California lilacs — a fast-growing broadleaf-evergreen shrub of the Pacific coast that smothers itself in dense thyrse clusters of pale-to-deep blue flowers in spring. Glossy three-veined, finely toothed dark-green leaves and a billowing shrub habit make it a signature blue mass on West Coast slopes. Drought tolerant once established, it asks for little summer water and resents overwatering; deer and elk browse the foliage and the bloom is a documented draw for native bees.

The signature evergreen shrub of the California chaparral and coastal foothills — leathery, sharply toothed dark-green leaves, flat-topped clusters of small white summer flowers, and the brilliant red pomes that earned it the names Christmasberry and California holly (and, by way of the Hollywood hills, supposedly the name "Hollywood"). Long-lived and deeply drought-tolerant; the winter berries feed more than twenty bird species when little else is fruiting.

A fast, suckering native shrub of streambanks and moist thickets across eastern North America, grown for huge flat-topped cymes of tiny lemon-scented white flowers in early summer and the clusters of dark elderberry drupes that follow. Spreads by root suckers into naturalized colonies 5-12 feet tall and wide; the flowers feed butterflies and the showy fruit feeds birds. The raw berries are not eaten fresh — they are cooked into jelly, pie, and wine.

A small native deciduous tree (or thicket-forming, suckering shrub) of eastern and central North America, grown for clouds of fragrant white 5-petaled flowers that open in March before the leaves and for the edible red plums that follow in early summer. It forms a broad, spreading crown with attractive dark reddish-brown twigs that sometimes carry thorny lateral branchlets. A documented larval host for swallowtails and other butterflies, with flowers of special value to native, bumble, and honey bees.

A tough, medium-sized native tree of the eastern and midwestern United States, grown as much for its showy edible orange fruit as for its distinctive thick, dark gray bark broken into rectangular blocks. Small urn-shaped white-to-greenish-yellow flowers open in May and June, and the sweet fruit ripens after frost. Largely dioecious — a female tree needs a male pollinizer nearby to set fruit — and notably drought- and walnut-tolerant once established.