Armand clematis

A small native tree with white spring flowers, edible summer berries, and copper to red fall color.

A native deciduous willow of northern North America famous for the silky, silvery catkins - the "pussies" - that swell on bare stems in late winter, often while snow is still on the ground. Usually grown as a large multi-stemmed shrub 6 to 15 feet tall, it thrives in moist to wet soils and tolerates drier ground better than most willows. Dioecious (separate male and female plants), it is one of the earliest pollen and nectar sources of the year and a documented host for a wide range of native bees and Lepidoptera.

Japanese wisteria is a woody deciduous twining climber native to Japan, where it climbs trees and scrambles over woodland margins; it produces the longest flower racemes of any wisteria - pendulous violet, lilac, pink, or white clusters reaching up to 6.6 feet in named cultivars - and a powerful grape-like fragrance in spring. In cultivation it excels as a dramatic focal-point trained over pergolas, arches, or walls, and can become a centenarian specimen. The honest catch is a cluster of serious drawbacks that every gardener must weigh: all parts are toxic (seeds and pods particularly so, a documented cause of poisoning in children and pets); it can take up to a decade to flower from seed; unpruned stems can engulf and structurally damage buildings, trees, and gutters; and it is listed by the Global Invasive Species Database as invasive in parts of North America, Australia, and elsewhere, where it has escaped cultivation and smothers native vegetation.

Filbert (Corylus maxima) is a large deciduous shrub native to southeastern Europe and southwestern Asia, from the Balkans through to Ordu in Turkey, where it has been cultivated for its larger-than-hazelnut edible fruits for millennia. In the garden it doubles as bold structural foliage - especially the wine-purple cultivar 'Purpurea' - making it as much an ornamental as a productive shrub. The honest catch is its sheer bulk and suckering ambition: left unmanaged it rapidly forms an impenetrable multi-stemmed thicket 20 to 33 feet tall, requires another Corylus nearby for worthwhile nut crops, and squirrels reliably harvest the nuts before the gardener does.