French lavender

A native eastern + central North American deciduous shrub with frothy white flower clusters in early summer + nitrogen-fixing root nodules (one of few non-legume nitrogen-fixers). Compact + drought-tolerant; tea was brewed from the leaves during the American Revolution as a colonial-era substitute for British tea.

Creeping cotoneaster is a deciduous spreading shrub native to the mountains of central and southwestern China, Nepal, and Taiwan, prized for its distinctive flat herringbone branching, tiny pink-white summer flowers, and masses of vivid red autumn berries that sustain birds through winter. It holds the RHS Award of Garden Merit and tolerates poor, dry soils on banks and walls where little else will perform. The honest catch is twofold: the berries are mildly toxic to humans and pets (cyanogenic seeds, GI-irritant flesh), and the plant self-seeds freely enough that it is naturalising widely in the UK and Ireland and is considered potentially invasive - a real concern before planting near wild margins or hedgerows.

Dwarf fothergilla (Fothergilla gardenii), also called dwarf witch alder, is a compact, slow-growing deciduous shrub of the southeastern US coastal plain, native from North Carolina south through South Carolina and Georgia to Alabama and the Florida panhandle. It earns its place for two clear seasons of interest. In spring, before or just as the leaves unfold, it carries short, fragrant, bottlebrush-like spikes of tiny petal-less flowers, and the whole white show comes from a dense mass of stamens rather than from any petals. In autumn the tidy blue-green leaves colour up in a mix of yellow, orange, and red, often several of those tones on one plant at once. It is a well-behaved small native shrub, usually staying around 2 to 3 feet high and about as wide, that wants an acidic, humus-rich, evenly moist but well-drained soil and full sun to part shade. In the wild it grows in wet pine savannas, pocosins, and bog margins, so it dislikes hot, dry, or limy ground and can spread slowly into a colony by root suckers.

A compact, mounding deciduous shrub bred in the 1930s by crossing the East Asian species Caryopteris incana (southern China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan) and C. mongholica (Siberia, Mongolia, northern China) - it has no wild range of its own. Its defining virtue is a flush of vivid blue-to-violet flowers on the current year's growth in late summer and early fall, a period when little else in the garden blooms, combined with aromatic gray-green foliage and exceptional drought tolerance once established. The honest catch is its borderline hardiness at the cold edge of its range: in zones 5–6 the woody stems routinely die to the ground in winter and the plant resprouts from the base each spring, behaving more like an herbaceous perennial than a shrub - gardeners in those zones should hold back pruning until new growth confirms the crown has survived.