Yaupon

A native eastern + central North American multi-stemmed deciduous shrub with dentate (toothed) foliage, white spring flower clusters, blue-black drupes, and reliable fall color. Especially valued for wildlife - among the most-cited native shrubs for fall-migration bird forage.

A native eastern North American multi-stemmed deciduous shrub or small tree with white spring flower clusters, edible dark-blue drupes, and red-purple fall foliage. Among the most adaptable native viburnums; tolerates a wide range of soil + light conditions.

Gray dogwood (Cornus racemosa) is not the dogwood most people arrive looking for. Flowering dogwood, Cornus florida, is the small tree with four big white bracts that read as petals; gray dogwood is a shrub with no bracts at all, and its flowers are small, white, four-petalled and packed into a domed terminal cluster. It is grown for stems, fruit and birds. The ornamental peak comes after the fruit, not during it: the drupes ripen white through August into October, the birds strip them within days, and what is left standing is the flower stalk itself, which by then has coloured a hard bright red and holds that colour for weeks against the greying autumn foliage. Missouri Botanical Garden makes the same observation from the other direction, describing the red terminal stems as contrast to the white berries. That is also the field mark - white fruit on RED pedicels separates it from silky dogwood, whose fruit is blue, and from pagoda dogwood, whose blue-black fruit sits on red stalks but on alternate leaves and tiered horizontal branches. The honest caveat is the same trait that makes it valuable. Gray dogwood suckers from underground rhizomes and forms thickets, and it is the most aggressive of the three at it. In a hedgerow, on a streambank, on an eroding slope or in a bird planting that is precisely what you want and MBG says so outright - plant it in groups and leave it alone to spread. Against a mown lawn edge or a tidy border it is a permanent annual chore, because you are not managing a shrub, you are managing a clone. Decide which of those two plantings you are making before you buy it, because the decision is very hard to reverse once the rhizomes are out past the original crown.

Nannyberry is the viburnum you can walk under. Missouri Botanical Garden describes a large, upright, multi-stemmed, suckering shrub of 10 to 18 feet that may also be grown as a single-trunk tree reaching 30 feet, and that second option is most of the reason to choose it: in a group where almost everything tops out as a rounded 6-to-10-foot mass, this is the one that can be limbed up into a small tree with a canopy, a trunk and usable space beneath. It is also the northernmost of them. MBG rates it Zone 2 to 8, the native range runs from New Brunswick west to southeastern Saskatchewan, and Wikipedia calls it one of the best small trees of eastern America for parks and gardens in regions of extreme winter cold. The fruit is the second argument. Flat-topped white cymes up to 5 inches across open in May and give way to blue-black drupes on reddish stalks that hang into winter, and unlike most of the genus they are genuinely good to eat - thick-skinned, sweet and juicy in Wikipedia's description, eaten off the bush or made into jam per MBG. Two caveats belong up front. The first is mildew: MBG lists mildew and leaf spot as occasional problems and the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center says outright that it sometimes develops mildew in shady areas, so this is a plant to give sun and moving air rather than a stuffy corner. The second is that it colonises by two routes at once. It sends up root suckers, which MBG says to remove unless naturalisation is what you want, and the Wildflower Center adds that old branches arch down and take root where they touch. Left alone at the back of a property that behaviour builds a thicket for free; in a tended border it is a job that returns every year.