An upright, multi-stemmed, rhizomatous deciduous shrub of the western U.S. and Canada, named for its showy, fragrant yellow-to-orange spring flowers. Glossy lobed leaves turn reddish-purple in fall, and the spring bloom gives way to edible black currants by mid to late summer. Tough and adaptable — it tolerates dry to seasonally flooded soils, poor and clay soils, drought, and erosion, and the flowers and fruit feed hummingbirds, butterflies, and birds.

A Pacific Northwest evergreen shrub (formerly Mahonia aquifolium; reclassified to Berberis) with holly-like spiny foliage, bright-yellow spring flower clusters, and blue-black grape-like berries. Oregon state flower; tolerates shade + drought once established. Berries are technically edible but tart; commonly used for jelly.

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 5-12 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 suckering, thicket-forming native cherry that reads as a large shrub or small tree across most of North America. Fragrant white flowers open in elongated drooping racemes in spring, followed by dense pendulous clusters of pea-sized cherries that ripen red to dark purple-black in late summer. The astringent fruit is technically edible after processing, and the plant is a workhorse for wildlife — feeding birds and mammals and hosting sphinx-moth larvae.

A tall, tuber-forming perennial sunflower native to eastern North America — also called Jerusalem artichoke or sunroot — grown both for its 2-4 inch bright-yellow late-summer sunflowers and its knobby edible underground tubers. Rough-hairy stems rise 6-10 feet bearing ovate, serrate leaves on winged petioles. It spreads aggressively by rhizome and self-seeding to form colonies; Missouri Botanical Garden flatly calls it "weedy and invasive" and difficult to remove once planted.

The signature evergreen shrub of the California chaparral and coastal foothills — leathery, sharply toothed dark-green leaves, flat-topped clusters of small white summer flowers, and the brilliant red pomes that earned it the names Christmasberry and California holly (and, by way of the Hollywood hills, supposedly the name "Hollywood"). Long-lived and deeply drought-tolerant; the winter berries feed more than twenty bird species when little else is fruiting.