Scotch broom

A large, vigorous, fountain-shaped deciduous shrub that earns its common name in late spring, when its arching stems are smothered in masses of pale-pink, yellow-throated, bell-shaped flowers. Native to China, it is one of the great old-fashioned spring shrubs - spectacular in full bloom, much loved by bees, and offering peeling brown bark for quiet winter interest. It is also genuinely big: expect 6 to 10 feet tall and wide at maturity, so give it room rather than fighting its size with the shears. The form to seek out is the Award-winning "Pink Cloud", which carries a clearer, richer pink than the variable seed-grown species.

Cape honeysuckle (Tecomaria capensis, Bignoniaceae) is a vigorous, evergreen scrambling shrub from southern and south-central Africa, valued for tubular orange-to-apricot flowers borne erratically across much of the year. It reaches about 6.6 to 9.8 feet tall and wide as a free-standing shrub, or can be trained much taller on a trellis or wall, and is widely used for informal hedging and as a hot-color border or container plant. It is frost-tender (RHS H1C; roughly USDA 9b-11) - in cooler climates it is grown under glass or as a summer container plant and overwintered indoors. In frost-free, mild climates it can become weedy: it has naturalised and is treated as invasive in parts of Australia and on islands such as the Azores, so site it where suckering and self-layering can be managed. It is not a recognised edible and is not flagged as notably toxic, though several plant parts feature in traditional southern-African medicine; treat it as ornamental rather than for consumption. Note the accepted binomial here is Tecomaria capensis (POWO/GBIF); the widely-seen Tecoma capensis is a synonym.

Doublefile viburnum is a deciduous shrub native to China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, grown for its spectacular tiered, horizontal branching draped in flat lacecap flower heads in late spring. It earns its place as a four-season focal point - white flowers in May, blue-black drupes in late summer, and often vivid red-purple autumn colour - but the honest catch is its sheer footprint: mature plants can spread 13 to 16 feet wide with rigidly horizontal branches that resent hard pruning, and the fruit is not edible.

Firebush (also called scarlet bush, hummingbird bush, and Mexican firecracker) is a fast-growing, evergreen, soft-stemmed shrub in the coffee family (Rubiaceae) and a Florida native: it grows wild from central Florida south through the Florida Keys, and on through the Bahamas, the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America into South America as far as Argentina. In a frost-free landscape it forms a dense, spreading shrub of 6 to 12 feet, occasionally to 15 feet, with whorls of oval leaves that are red-hairy when young and speckled red or purple at maturity, reddish stems, and terminal clusters of slender, tubular, orange-red flowers 0.5 to 1.5 inches long nearly all year. Hummingbirds and butterflies work the flowers, and birds eat the small berries, which ripen from red to black and are edible. It is frost-tender: a freeze can kill it to the ground, it regrows from the roots through zone 9, and farther north it is grown as a 2 to 3 feet summer annual or container plant. Buy with care, because several non-native firebushes are sold under the same name: plants labeled 'African', 'Dwarf', 'Compacta', or 'Firefly' are often Hamelia patens var. glabra, a variety from southern Mexico to northern South America with smooth leaves and mostly yellow flowers, and 'Bahama firebush' is a different species, Hamelia cuprea. Florida's native form is Hamelia patens var. patens, the plant this record describes.

Flowering currant is a deciduous shrub native to the Pacific coast of western North America, from British Columbia south through Washington and Oregon to coastal California (as far south as Santa Barbara County), with a marginal inland presence in Idaho and a southern outpost on Guadalupe Island, Mexico. Its bold dangling racemes of deep-pink to crimson flowers open in early spring, often before the leaves, making it one of the most conspicuous late-winter shrubs in mild gardens. The honest catch is threefold: it is a confirmed alternate host of white pine blister rust (a serious pathogen of five-needled pines), its blue-black berries are edible but notably insipid, and it has become an established invasive weed in New Zealand (where it forms dense stands excluding native species) and is a more minor, localized weed in Tasmania.

A large deciduous European-native shrub grown for a three-season show: maple-like lobed leaves that color well in autumn, flat white lacecap flower clusters in late spring, and heavy drooping bunches of translucent red berries that hang on into winter. Each flower head is a showy ring of large sterile outer florets surrounding a fertile center, giving the lacecap its distinctive look. It is one of the best all-round wildlife shrubs you can plant - the open flowers feed hoverflies and bees, and the red fruit feeds birds through the cold months - and it tolerates wet soil, making it a natural choice for hedgerows, damp corners, and wild gardens. Two honest cautions go with it: the raw berries are mildly toxic to people, and this is the European guelder rose, not the North American cranberrybush.