Creeping Cotoneaster

An airy, see-through ornamental in the vervain family (Verbenaceae), native to South America and naturalized across the warm southeastern United States. NC State Extension describes an erect plant 2 to 5 feet tall on thin but strong red-marked green stems, topped from summer into fall by dense, flat-topped clusters of small tubular purple-lavender flowers held well above mostly basal, lance-shaped, serrated dark-green leaves. A perennial in USDA zones 7-11 (grown as an annual in colder climates), it is fast-growing, drought and deer tolerant, and a magnet for bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds - though it self-sows freely and some sources have labeled it invasive.

Cherry laurel is a fast-growing evergreen shrub or small tree native to the Black Sea rim - from Albania and Bulgaria east through Turkey to the Caucasus and northern Iran - prized for its bold, glossy foliage, spring racemes of creamy-white flowers, and unmatched tolerance of shade, drought, and heavy pruning. It makes an outstanding dense hedge, screen, or woodland understory filler in zones 6–9. The honest catch is a two-part warning: every part of the plant contains cyanogenic glycosides (prussic acid), making leaves, seeds, and fruit genuinely toxic to humans and animals; and in mild, moist climates such as the UK and Pacific Northwest it seeds aggressively via bird-dispersed fruit, is classified as invasive, and can smother native understory vegetation wholesale.

Mapleleaf viburnum is the small one, the shade one, and the dry one, and those three facts are the whole reason to plant it. Missouri Botanical Garden puts it at 3 to 6 feet tall and 2 to 4 feet wide, which makes it roughly a third the size of arrowwood or blackhaw viburnum and the only member of this group that fits under an established oak without a fight. It is also, in MBG words, generally more shade tolerant than many of the other species of Viburnum, and the Wildflower Center rates its drought tolerance HIGH on dry rocky soils. Dry shade under mature hardwoods is the hardest site most gardeners own and the shortlist of shrubs that actually want it is short; this is on it. The leaves are the field mark and the name: opposite, three-lobed and coarsely toothed like a red maple leaf, 2 to 5 inches long, with small black spots on the undersides that no other viburnum in this catalog carries. Flowers are tiny, white, and held in flat-topped long-stalked cymes to 3 inches across, and the fruit ripens through red to blue-black in late summer. The autumn colour is the pay-off and it is genuinely unusual: MBG calls it excellent reddish-purple to magenta, and Wikipedia records the range as pale yellow through orange to pink, rose or red-purple depending on how much light the plant gets. Pink is not a colour eastern shrubs generally offer. Two honest limits. It suckers, and the Wildflower Center is blunter about it than MBG is - suckers profusely to form large, loose, open colonies - so you are planting a spreading understorey patch, not a specimen. And the fruit crop is thin compared with arrowwood or nannyberry, because a clonal colony is one genetic individual and viburnums generally need a second one. Plant it for the leaves, the ground it covers and the spring azure caterpillars, and treat any fruit as a bonus.

Two things to settle before anything else. First, the name: this catalog already carries a plant called Possumhaw, and it is a holly, Ilex decidua. They are unrelated, they want different ground, and only one of them is this shrub. Missouri Botanical Garden files this species under smooth witherod and mentions possumhaw viburnum second, which is the safer name to buy under. Second, the ground: this is the wet-soil viburnum. MBG rates it medium to wet water, lists wet soil as its one tolerance and rain garden among its two suggested uses, and the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center puts it in savannas, low wet woods and bogs on wet, mucky, acid soils. That is the axis that separates it from its relatives here. Mapleleaf viburnum is the dry-shade suckering understorey shrub, nannyberry is the tall small tree of upland edges, and possumhaw viburnum is the one you plant where water sits. What you get for the wet feet is the best fruit display in the group and one of the best of any native shrub. The ovoid berries do not simply ripen, they run a colour sequence - light pink, then deep pink, then blue, then purplish black - and because a cluster ripens unevenly, deep pink and blue-purple berries commonly sit in the same cyme in late summer against glossy dark green leaves that follow with maroon to red-purple fall colour. The catch is that the display depends on pollination. MBG says outright to plant shrubs in groups rather than as single specimens for best cross-pollination and subsequent fruit display, so a lone plant is the one way to get all of the shrub and none of the reason for it.

Sasanqua camellia is an evergreen shrub native to the forests of southern Japan - Kyushu, Shikoku, and the Ryukyu Islands - where it grows on forest margins and hillsides. In gardens it is prized as the earliest-flowering camellia, bearing fragrant blooms from September through January when almost nothing else is in flower, and it tolerates more sun and drought than its cousin Camellia japonica. The honest catch is cold hardiness: open flowers are blackened by hard frost, and the plant itself is reliably hardy only from zone 7a south, making it unsuitable for much of the northeastern and midwestern United States without meaningful shelter.

Snowberry is a deciduous, suckering North American shrub native across Canada and the northern and western United States, prized for its waxy, snow-white berries that persist well into winter after the leaves have dropped. It tolerates a wide range of soils and exposures - full sun to deep shade, chalk to clay - making it one of the most adaptable shrubs in the genus. The honest catch is threefold: the berries are toxic to humans (causing vomiting), the rhizomatous root system can colonise an area to form dense, hard-to-remove thickets, and the plant spreads aggressively in moist soils - so it is a plant that earns its place in naturalistic or wildlife plantings but demands a firm boundary in a tidy garden.