An old garden-favorite annual native to Mexico, grown for showy daisy-like flowers in nearly every color but true blue — red, yellow, orange, pink, rose, lavender, green, and white. Bushy, leafy plants rise on upright, hairy, branching stems and bloom continuously from early summer to frost. A magnet for butterflies and hummingbirds, and one of the most reliable cut-and-come-again cutting-garden flowers.

A low, mat-forming member of the mustard family from the Mediterranean coast, grown almost everywhere as a cool-season annual for its dense mounds of tiny, sweetly fragrant white four-petaled flowers. The flowering is so profuse it often hides the gray-green foliage entirely. It thrives in cool weather, tolerates dry soil and drought, and is a reliable nectar source for small pollinators.

A tall, bold warm-season annual from Mexico and Guatemala (the "African" name is a misnomer of its European garden history) grown for large, fully double, pompon-like flowerheads in saturated yellow, gold, and orange over strongly aromatic, finely divided foliage. Plants reach 12-48 inches and bloom from early summer to frost in full sun. The petals are edible and used as a culinary garnish and natural dye, and the flowers are the iconic "flor de muerto" of Mexican Day of the Dead. Despite the wide listed zone range it is frost-tender and grown for a single warm season.

A tough, vigorous clump-forming perennial — the classic orange "tawny daylily" or "ditch lily" seen naturalized along roadsides and old homesteads. Each rusty-orange, trumpet-shaped flower opens for a single day, but tall branched scapes (to 3-6 feet) open fresh blooms in succession through early-to-midsummer above arching, strap-like foliage. Native to eastern Asia, not North America; the commonly grown form is a sterile triploid that sets no seed but spreads aggressively by thick rhizomes, forming dense colonies. Famously bulletproof and adaptable, but plant it knowing it will run.

The classic garden nasturtium — a fast, easy annual grown for showy, long-spurred, funnel-shaped flowers in red, orange, yellow, and cream above round, shield-shaped (peltate) leaves with radiating veins. Dwarf-bushy types sprawl through beds and containers while climbing types scramble up a trellis. Every part except the roots — leaves, buds, flowers, pods, and seeds — is edible with a peppery, watercress-like bite, and the flowers draw hummingbirds and butterflies.

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.