Pink muhly grass

The original black-eyed Susan - a bristly-stemmed, short-lived meadow daisy that behaves as an annual, biennial, or brief perennial depending on where it grows. It blooms hard and early from seed, then carries itself forward by reseeding rather than by spreading into a permanent clump.

A short-lived native perennial of wet woodland edges, stream banks, and ditches across the Americas, named for the brilliant scarlet-red flowers that rise on erect, unbranched terminal spikes from mid-to-late summer. Each tubular, two-lipped bloom is shaped for the hummingbird tongue - the plant depends on ruby-throated hummingbirds for pollination because most insects cannot work the long flower tube. It demands constant moisture and tolerates brief flooding, but its foliage carries alkaloids that are very toxic to humans if eaten.

Also called Indian currant, coralberry is a dense, suckering deciduous shrub of the honeysuckle family, native to the eastern and central United States and northeastern Mexico, where it grows in open woods, thickets, fields and bottomland woods. It makes a mound of arching, finely hairy stems 2 to 5 feet tall that spreads by runners into colonies, carries small greenish-white to pink-tinged flowers that are easy to miss, and is grown for the clusters of coral-red to purple berries that ripen in fall and hang on the bare stems through most of winter. Two things to weigh first: NC State Extension lists the fruit as poisonous to people (low severity, causing vomiting and diarrhea), and it can be weedy: NC State tags it so, and Kew's World Checklist records it as naturalized beyond its native range in New England, New York, the interior West, Ontario and parts of Europe. On a slope, in a woodland edge or in a wildlife planting, its suckering is an asset rather than a chore.

A native upright perennial with fragrant midsummer flower panicles in pink, white, lavender, or red - a classic border anchor and hummingbird-friendly choice for sunny beds.

Largeflower tickseed is sold as a perennial and behaves like one for about two years. Missouri Botanical Garden says plainly that the plants are somewhat short-lived and that self-seeding is what perpetuates a good planting; the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center is blunter still, recording that it is not reliably perennial and self-sows readily, becoming weedy. Those are two descriptions of the same plant, and believing them is the whole difference between a stand that lasts and an expensive annual. What you are buying is a seed-perpetuated colony rather than a long-lived clump: the original crowns thin out after two or three seasons and volunteers carry the planting on, which means it survives only where there is bare soil to germinate in and where some flowers are allowed to set seed. Deadhead every head, every year, and the colony ends when the crowns do. The flowers are the largest of the common yellow tickseeds, 2 to 3 inches across, deep yellow rays notched at the tips around a darker golden disc, held one to a stem on slender erect stalks to about 24 inches. What it wants is the opposite of border hospitality: poor sandy or rocky soil with sharp drainage, full sun, and no irrigation. Missouri Botanical Garden records it as tolerant of heat, humidity and drought and names crown rot in moist, poorly drained soil as the way it dies, so the reliable method of killing it is kindness. Within this catalog it sits between plains coreopsis (Coreopsis tinctoria), a true annual that never pretends otherwise, and lanceleaf coreopsis (Coreopsis lanceolata), the other short-lived perennial and the plant it is most often mislabelled as. The leaves settle it: lanceleaf carries narrow, hairy, unlobed lance-shaped leaves gathered in a basal tuft, while largeflower has lobeless linear leaves at the base and pinnatifid, deeply lobed upper leaves cut into linear segments up the stem.

A tough, bright perennial for sunny borders, pollinator patches, and late-summer color.