Northern spicebush

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 to 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.

Mapleleaf viburnum is the small one, the shade one, and the dry one, and those three facts are the whole reason to plant it. Missouri Botanical Garden puts it at 3 to 6 feet tall and 2 to 4 feet wide, which makes it roughly a third the size of arrowwood or blackhaw viburnum and the only member of this group that fits under an established oak without a fight. It is also, in MBG words, generally more shade tolerant than many of the other species of Viburnum, and the Wildflower Center rates its drought tolerance HIGH on dry rocky soils. Dry shade under mature hardwoods is the hardest site most gardeners own and the shortlist of shrubs that actually want it is short; this is on it. The leaves are the field mark and the name: opposite, three-lobed and coarsely toothed like a red maple leaf, 2 to 5 inches long, with small black spots on the undersides that no other viburnum in this catalog carries. Flowers are tiny, white, and held in flat-topped long-stalked cymes to 3 inches across, and the fruit ripens through red to blue-black in late summer. The autumn colour is the pay-off and it is genuinely unusual: MBG calls it excellent reddish-purple to magenta, and Wikipedia records the range as pale yellow through orange to pink, rose or red-purple depending on how much light the plant gets. Pink is not a colour eastern shrubs generally offer. Two honest limits. It suckers, and the Wildflower Center is blunter about it than MBG is - suckers profusely to form large, loose, open colonies - so you are planting a spreading understorey patch, not a specimen. And the fruit crop is thin compared with arrowwood or nannyberry, because a clonal colony is one genetic individual and viburnums generally need a second one. Plant it for the leaves, the ground it covers and the spring azure caterpillars, and treat any fruit as a bonus.

A native evergreen shrub of the eastern North American Appalachian + Piedmont understory producing extraordinary spring clusters of pink-to-white cup-shaped flowers with a unique spring-loaded pollination mechanism (anthers held under tension, triggered by visiting pollinators). State flower of Connecticut + Pennsylvania. Critically: NC State explicitly flags Kalmia as having HIGH-SEVERITY poison characteristics - all plant parts toxic to humans, dogs, cats, horses, and livestock; even honey from mountain-laurel nectar can poison humans ("mad honey").

Two things to settle before anything else. First, the name: this catalog already carries a plant called Possumhaw, and it is a holly, Ilex decidua. They are unrelated, they want different ground, and only one of them is this shrub. Missouri Botanical Garden files this species under smooth witherod and mentions possumhaw viburnum second, which is the safer name to buy under. Second, the ground: this is the wet-soil viburnum. MBG rates it medium to wet water, lists wet soil as its one tolerance and rain garden among its two suggested uses, and the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center puts it in savannas, low wet woods and bogs on wet, mucky, acid soils. That is the axis that separates it from its relatives here. Mapleleaf viburnum is the dry-shade suckering understorey shrub, nannyberry is the tall small tree of upland edges, and possumhaw viburnum is the one you plant where water sits. What you get for the wet feet is the best fruit display in the group and one of the best of any native shrub. The ovoid berries do not simply ripen, they run a colour sequence - light pink, then deep pink, then blue, then purplish black - and because a cluster ripens unevenly, deep pink and blue-purple berries commonly sit in the same cyme in late summer against glossy dark green leaves that follow with maroon to red-purple fall colour. The catch is that the display depends on pollination. MBG says outright to plant shrubs in groups rather than as single specimens for best cross-pollination and subsequent fruit display, so a lone plant is the one way to get all of the shrub and none of the reason for it.

A native deciduous holly of eastern North America grown for brilliant red berries that persist on bare stems through fall and winter - feeds songbirds and small mammals when little else is producing. Dioecious: one male pollinizer is required within 50 feet for every 10-20 female plants.

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 full-shade woodland-floor community for deep shade beneath a closed canopy: an understory shrub, spreading groundcovers, spring ephemerals, and a large fern - eastern North American natives that expect low light and leaf-litter soil.