Herb Robert

A tender perennial from Madagascar grown across temperate North America as a heat-loving summer annual - a mounding 6-18 inch plant in the dogbane family covered in flat five-lobed phlox-like flowers from June to frost. The species blooms rosy-pink to red with a darker mauve throat, and it shrugs off the hot, humid weather that wilts most bedding plants. Every part of the plant is poisonous: it is the natural source of the vinca alkaloids used in chemotherapy.

A fast, sun-loving member of the aster family grown as a warm-season annual, Gaillardia pulchella throws a long succession of 2-inch daisy-like flowers from early summer until frost. The ray florets blaze in bands of red and gold around a darker domed center - the firecracker coloring that gives it its name - on a wiry, branching 12-24 inch clump. It is built for hot, dry, sunny ground where richer-fed bedding plants sulk, blooming hardest exactly when summer heat peaks.

A compact, frost-tender warm-season annual from Mexico and Central America grown for its dense, fuzzy, thread-like ("flossy") flower clusters - most famously in soft true blue and lavender-blue, the trait that sets it apart from almost every other bedding annual, plus pink and white forms. It mounds into a clumping cushion 6 to 12 inches tall and about as wide, blooming from early summer until frost over soft, heart-shaped, slightly hairy leaves. It is easy and rewarding bedding, edging, and container color in full sun to part shade with steady moisture, but it is strictly look-don't-eat: the foliage and stems contain hepatotoxic pyrrolizidine alkaloids and are toxic if ingested.

A tender perennial from New Guinea grown almost everywhere in North America as a warm-season annual, prized for non-stop bright bloom in part shade - and, unlike common impatiens, in considerably more sun. It mounds 6 to 24 inches tall and 1.5 to 3 feet wide, carrying large, flat, five-petaled flowers in coral, salmon, pink, red, orange, lavender, and white above bold, often bronze-tinted dark foliage. Its real selling point is honest and practical: Impatiens hawkeri is resistant to impatiens downy mildew (Plasmopara obducens), the disease that collapsed plantings of Impatiens walleriana, making it the dependable shade-to-part-sun bedding plant where the common species can no longer be trusted.

The garden petunia is a complex Brazilian-derived hybrid in the nightshade family, grown almost everywhere as a warm-season bedding annual for its funnel-shaped, often fragrant flowers in nearly every color except true brown and black. Missouri Botanical Garden ranks it second only to impatiens in annual bedding-plant sales, prized for non-stop bloom from late spring until frost. It is a tender perennial hardy only in USDA Zones 10-11, so most of North America treats it as a single-season annual.

A small annual or biennial with glossy, lobed leaves, reddish stems and small pink flowers. In Washington it is a Class B noxious weed and quarantined species: buying, selling, transporting and distributing it is prohibited. This record supports identification and management there, not planting. The Washington State Noxious Weed Control Board documents its spread through shaded woodland, forest openings and sunny sites.