Japanese Mahonia

Sasanqua camellia is an evergreen shrub native to the forests of southern Japan - Kyushu, Shikoku, and the Ryukyu Islands - where it grows on forest margins and hillsides. In gardens it is prized as the earliest-flowering camellia, bearing fragrant blooms from September through January when almost nothing else is in flower, and it tolerates more sun and drought than its cousin Camellia japonica. The honest catch is cold hardiness: open flowers are blackened by hard frost, and the plant itself is reliably hardy only from zone 7a south, making it unsuitable for much of the northeastern and midwestern United States without meaningful shelter.

Mountain hydrangea is a compact, deciduous flowering shrub native to the mountainous regions of Japan and Korea, where it grows in cool, moist, partly shaded conditions - and that cool mountain origin is the honest catch. Hardy through USDA Zone 6 when dormant, the plant breaks dormancy early and its new spring growth is reliably vulnerable to late frosts; a single late freeze in April can destroy an entire season's bloom on wood that would otherwise flower in midsummer. It is smaller and more refined than bigleaf hydrangea, with serrated leaves and distinctive lacecap flowerheads in blue or pink depending on soil pH, making it a graceful focal point for partly shaded borders where consistent moisture can be maintained.

A large, vigorous, fountain-shaped deciduous shrub that earns its common name in late spring, when its arching stems are smothered in masses of pale-pink, yellow-throated, bell-shaped flowers. Native to China, it is one of the great old-fashioned spring shrubs - spectacular in full bloom, much loved by bees, and offering peeling brown bark for quiet winter interest. It is also genuinely big: expect 6 to 10 feet tall and wide at maturity, so give it room rather than fighting its size with the shears. The form to seek out is the Award-winning "Pink Cloud", which carries a clearer, richer pink than the variable seed-grown species.

Cape honeysuckle (Tecomaria capensis, Bignoniaceae) is a vigorous, evergreen scrambling shrub from southern and south-central Africa, valued for tubular orange-to-apricot flowers borne erratically across much of the year. It reaches about 6.6 to 9.8 feet tall and wide as a free-standing shrub, or can be trained much taller on a trellis or wall, and is widely used for informal hedging and as a hot-color border or container plant. It is frost-tender (RHS H1C; roughly USDA 9b-11) - in cooler climates it is grown under glass or as a summer container plant and overwintered indoors. In frost-free, mild climates it can become weedy: it has naturalised and is treated as invasive in parts of Australia and on islands such as the Azores, so site it where suckering and self-layering can be managed. It is not a recognised edible and is not flagged as notably toxic, though several plant parts feature in traditional southern-African medicine; treat it as ornamental rather than for consumption. Note the accepted binomial here is Tecomaria capensis (POWO/GBIF); the widely-seen Tecoma capensis is a synonym.

Doublefile viburnum is a deciduous shrub native to China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, grown for its spectacular tiered, horizontal branching draped in flat lacecap flower heads in late spring. It earns its place as a four-season focal point - white flowers in May, blue-black drupes in late summer, and often vivid red-purple autumn colour - but the honest catch is its sheer footprint: mature plants can spread 13 to 16 feet wide with rigidly horizontal branches that resent hard pruning, and the fruit is not edible.

Flowering currant is a deciduous shrub native to the Pacific coast of western North America, from British Columbia south through Washington and Oregon to coastal California (as far south as Santa Barbara County), with a marginal inland presence in Idaho and a southern outpost on Guadalupe Island, Mexico. Its bold dangling racemes of deep-pink to crimson flowers open in early spring, often before the leaves, making it one of the most conspicuous late-winter shrubs in mild gardens. The honest catch is threefold: it is a confirmed alternate host of white pine blister rust (a serious pathogen of five-needled pines), its blue-black berries are edible but notably insipid, and it has become an established invasive weed in New Zealand (where it forms dense stands excluding native species) and is a more minor, localized weed in Tasmania.