A tall warm-season bunchgrass that was once dominant across the North American tallgrass prairie — Indian grass produces stiff vertical flowering stems topped with feathery light-brown panicles highlighted by yellow stamens August through October, then golden-orange fall foliage. Wind-pollinated; seeds feed songbirds and small mammals. Drought-tolerant, erosion-resistant, fire-adapted; among the most resilient native grasses for prairie restoration and meadow plantings.

A native evergreen fern with leathery dark blue-green fronds in upright vase-shaped clumps. Among the most drought-tolerant native ferns — useful for drier-shade settings where most other ferns fail. The "marginal" name refers to sori (spore clusters) carried at the leaflet margins. Evergreen through winter in zones 5+; reliably long-lived (20-30+ years).

Korean velvet grass (Zoysia tenuifolia) is an extremely fine-textured, warm-season turfgrass native to East Asia, prized as a low, almost mossy 'no-mow' lawn alternative and groundcover. Left unmown it knits into a dense, undulating carpet of tiny needle-fine blades that mounds and ripples like green velvet — the look that earns its other names, 'temple grass' and 'Mascarene grass.' It is slow to establish but, once knit in, dense and surprisingly traffic-tolerant. Two honest caveats keep it from being a carefree choice: it spreads aggressively by surface stolons (runners) and will creep into beds and over a neighbor's edge unless contained by hard edging, and like all zoysias it is a warm-season grass that turns straw-brown and goes dormant through cool weather — it is NOT evergreen in winter. Its taxonomy is also muddled: many authorities treat Zoysia tenuifolia as a synonym of Zoysia matrella or Zoysia pacifica, so it travels under several names in the trade.

A native evergreen fern of eastern North America that holds leathery dark green fronds through winter and provides ground-level songbird cover — ideal for shaded woodland slopes and erosion-prone banks.

A spectacular tall vase-shaped native fern with broad upright sterile fronds (resembling ostrich plumes — hence the name) and distinctive contrasting fertile fronds that emerge brown + persistent through winter. The traditional edible fiddlehead source — young curled fronds harvested in early spring are sold seasonally as a delicacy. Spreads vigorously via rhizomes in moist soils; provides good groundcover-scale presence.

The cultivated cereal oat, an erect cool-season annual grass grown for grain, forage, and — increasingly in gardens — as a fast, soil-building cover crop. From a spring or late-summer sowing it shoots up to 2-4 feet of slender, upright culms topped by an open, airy seed head (a spreading panicle) whose dangling spikelets ripen from green to gold. Domesticated in the Old World from wild oats, it is not a native wildflower but a true annual crop: it germinates fast, smothers weeds, builds biomass, and in cold zones conveniently winter-kills to leave an easy mulch in spring. Gardeners reach for it most as a green manure and erosion-stopping nurse crop, and for the soft, grassy texture and ripening-gold seed heads it adds while it grows.