Quince

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.

A small native understory tree of eastern North American forests producing the largest native fruit on the continent - a banana-custard-flavored tropical-tasting drupe in late summer. The canonical larval host for zebra swallowtail (Protographium marcellus, an Annonaceae specialist) per NC State; without pawpaw colonies the butterfly cannot reproduce. Self-incompatible - two genetically distinct trees are required for fruit set. Fly-and-beetle-pollinated via fetid maroon spring flowers.

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.

Once the dominant canopy hardwood of the eastern United States forest - an estimated four billion trees, prized for fast growth, rot-resistant timber, and an enormous annual crop of sweet edible nuts that fed people, livestock, and wildlife alike. In the early 1900s an introduced Asian fungus, chestnut blight (Cryphonectria parasitica), swept through and functionally destroyed it: by the 1950s the species was effectively extinct as a mature forest tree. Surviving root systems still send up sprouts from old stumps, but the blight almost always girdles and kills them before they can grow large enough to flower and reproduce. The honest reality for a gardener is that you cannot reliably grow a mature wild-type American chestnut today. The realistic paths are blight-resistant backcross hybrids from The American Chestnut Foundation or transgenic blight-tolerant lines still being deployed - not a pure wild seedling, which the blight will almost certainly kill.

A frost-tender broadleaf evergreen tree of the laurel family, native to Mexico and Central America and grown across the tropics and subtropics for its buttery, pear-shaped fruit. Glossy dark-green elliptic leaves 4 to 8 inches long clothe a tree that reaches 30 to 60 feet, hung with greenish-yellow flower panicles that give way to large single-seeded berries. Hardy only in USDA zones 10-12 - north of that it is an indoor curiosity easily sprouted from a pit, but one that rarely fruits.