Canada wild rye

Idaho fescue is the plant that the small blue mound in every garden centre is imitating. That mound is almost always Festuca glauca, a European ornamental that dies out in the centre and wants replacing every few years; Idaho fescue is the western North American original, a densely clumping, long-lived perennial bunchgrass with the same fine blue to grey-green foliage on a plant roughly three times the size and with a genuine ecological job. It is a cool-season grass, flowering April to July on stiff stalks that stand about twice the height of the leaf tuft, and it is built underground rather than sideways: thick, deeply penetrating roots carrying symbiotic mycorrhizae, and no rhizomes at all. That is the whole difference between this grass and red fescue, the creeping lawn species in this same group. Idaho fescue never knits into turf, never repairs a gap by running, and cannot be mown as a lawn. What it does instead is hold a slope. The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center calls it drought tolerant and excellent for erosion control, and notes the trap in the same breath: seedlings are only weakly competitive, and only mature plants become strongly competitive. Add that its seed is commercially available but not highly germinable, and the honest summary of establishment is that this is a two-to-three-year project on a weedy site, not a one-season fix. Two more caveats belong up front. There is no Missouri Botanical Garden PlantFinder profile for this species and no RHS Find a Plant entry, so this record rests on a native-plant database and an encyclopedia rather than on horticultural trial guidance, and it is thinner on garden performance than the fescue records around it. And its documented ground is western: rocky slopes and dry openings in woods, from British Columbia and Alberta south through the mountains to central California and Colorado. Nothing cited here describes how it behaves in a humid eastern summer, so this record does not guess.

A native cool-to-warm-season grass forming graceful upright clumps with distinctive flat oat-like seed heads that dangle decoratively from the stems through summer + fall. Often called sea oats (though true sea oats are Uniola paniculata, a coastal species). Among the few native grasses that tolerates significant shade - useful for woodland-edge plantings. Self-seeds vigorously in moist soils; manage seedheads in formal settings.

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.

A tall warm-season bunchgrass that was once dominant across the North American tallgrass prairie - Indian grass produces stiff vertical flowering stems topped with feathery light-brown panicles highlighted by yellow stamens August through October, then golden-orange fall foliage. Wind-pollinated; seeds feed songbirds and small mammals. Drought-tolerant, erosion-resistant, fire-adapted; among the most resilient native grasses for prairie restoration and meadow plantings.

A Pacific Northwest evergreen fern with dark-green leathery fronds reaching 3 to 5 feet long - among the most iconic Pacific Northwest understory plants. Long-lived (decades), shade-tolerant, and one of the most reliable evergreen ferns for cool moist climates.

A warm-season native bunchgrass of the eastern and central United States, also called hairawn muhly or purple muhly, grown for the airy clouds of pink to pinkish-red flower heads that float above its fine, wiry leaves from September to November. It takes heat, humidity, drought, salt and poor sandy or rocky soil, is highly deer resistant and needs little care beyond cutting back in spring. It is rare, known only from old records or gone from much of the northern edge of its wild range, so buy nursery-grown plants rather than digging wild ones.