Spearmint

A rough, sprawling Mediterranean annual grown for showy, open racemes of drooping, star-shaped bright blue flowers in summer. Branched stems and wrinkled, dull gray-green leaves are clad in bristly hairs and carry the taste and fragrance of cucumber. Easy in poor, dry soils, drought-tolerant, a magnet for bees, and a self-seeder that returns to the garden year after year.

A bushy, lemon-scented herbaceous perennial of the mint family, grown for its wrinkled, ovate medium-green leaves that crush to a bright citrus fragrance. Tiny two-lipped white-to-pale-yellow flowers appear in the leaf axils through summer and draw bees. Native to southern Europe, it has escaped gardens and naturalized across much of the U.S.; frequent pruning keeps it leafy, curbs self-seeding, and produces the most fragrant new growth.

A rhizomatous, upright herbaceous perennial of the mint family, most commonly grown as a culinary or medicinal herb and as a ground cover. A natural hybrid of watermint (Mentha aquatica) and spearmint (Mentha spicata), it carries fragrant rounded-to-lance-shaped toothed leaves on square stems and showy pink flower spikes in mid- to late summer. Native to Europe, it spreads aggressively by rhizomes into an attractive ground cover and rarely sets seed, so it is propagated vegetatively and is best confined by a soil barrier (Missouri Botanical Garden PlantFinder).

A fast annual culinary herb grown for both its aromatic, feathery blue-green foliage and its pungent seeds. Stiff hollow stems rise 3 to 5 feet and carry large, flattened compound umbels of tiny yellow flowers in late summer. Native to Asia Minor and the Mediterranean, dill has naturalized across parts of North America. The showy umbels draw bees, wasps, lacewings, hover flies, and other beneficial insects, and the lacy foliage is a classic larval host for the black swallowtail butterfly.

The classic lawn daisy: a low, rosette-forming perennial with spoon-shaped leaves and white, often pink-tipped ray flowers around a yellow disc on short stems, blooming from spring into autumn. The flowers close at night and in rain - the old "day's eye" - and double cool-season bedding forms such as "Pomponette" and "Habanera" are widely grown. Often written off as a lawn weed, it is in fact a tough, charming, child's-favourite groundcover that flowers for months, thrives in mown grass because it keeps its blooms low, and offers easy early-season nectar and pollen. The flowers and young leaves are edible.

A low-growing native eastern North American perennial groundcover producing small intensely-flavored red berries in early summer + white five-petaled flowers in spring. The genetic parent (with F. chiloensis) of the modern cultivated strawberry (F. ×ananassa). Berries smaller than cultivated but exceptional flavor. Spreads via runners (stolons); makes excellent edible groundcover under fruit trees.