Cornelian cherry

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

Chocolate vine is a vigorous, twining woody climber native to China, Japan, and Korea, producing clusters of spice-scented purple-maroon flowers in spring and large sausage-shaped fruits in autumn. It adapts readily to most well-drained soils in sun or part-shade and covers structures fast, making it a striking focal-point plant for walls, fences, and pergolas. The honest catch is its invasive potential: it smothers native shrubs and trees by blocking sunlight and is listed as invasive across much of the US East Coast and the Pacific Northwest, so it must not be planted where it can escape into natural areas, and annual hard pruning is essential to keep it under control.

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 to 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 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.

The European wild cherry - also called mazzard or gean - and the parent species behind nearly every sweet cherry cultivar sold for fruit, including Bing. Fragrant white flowers open singly or in 3-5 flowered clusters in spring just before the leaves, followed by small sweet red-to-black cherries in early summer. A deciduous tree of 15 to 30 feet in cultivation (to 60 feet in the wild); birds and squirrels relish the fruit and have naturalized it from gardens into the wild across eastern and midwestern North America.

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.