Blue passionflower

A small native tree with white spring flowers, edible summer berries, and copper to red fall color.

Pagoda dogwood (Cornus alternifolia) is the dogwood that kills itself from the top down, and the disease has a name worth learning before you plant one. Golden canker (Cryptodiaporthe corni) turns an infected branch a bright, unmistakable golden-yellow speckled with orange fruiting bodies, kills the wood beyond it, and - if it reaches the trunk - kills everything above the point it got in. No fungicide controls it. The only treatment is cutting the branch out 4 to 6 inches below the yellow tissue and disinfecting the shears between cuts, and the only prevention is siting: the fungus takes hold on plants that are drought-stressed or heat-stressed, which is why this is a part-shade, cool-rooted, evenly-moist plant rather than a lawn specimen in full afternoon sun. Missouri Botanical Garden's culture line points the same way - some afternoon shade is appreciated in hot summer climates such as the St. Louis area - and the species genuinely thins out towards the southern edge of its range. Set that against what you get. Nothing else in the genus builds a frame like this: strongly horizontal branches held in separate tiers with gaps of air between them and the tips turned up, on a flat-topped crown 15 to 25 feet tall and often WIDER than tall at 20 to 32 feet. And it is the odd one out botanically - every other dogwood you are likely to meet in a garden has opposite leaves, and this one is alternate, which is exactly what the epithet says and the fastest field call in the genus. Two expectations to reset. If you arrived here from the word dogwood you are probably picturing Cornus florida and its four big white bracts; pagoda dogwood has NO showy bracts at all, just genuinely small cream flowers in flat open cymes, and it is grown for its architecture, its fruit and its birds. And the fruit is the field separation within this shrub group: pagoda dogwood ripens blue-black drupes on coral-RED stalks, silky dogwood ripens blue, gray dogwood ripens white on red pedicels. The birds sort all three out within days of ripening.

A native deciduous willow of northern North America famous for the silky, silvery catkins - the "pussies" - that swell on bare stems in late winter, often while snow is still on the ground. Usually grown as a large multi-stemmed shrub 6 to 15 feet tall, it thrives in moist to wet soils and tolerates drier ground better than most willows. Dioecious (separate male and female plants), it is one of the earliest pollen and nectar sources of the year and a documented host for a wide range of native bees and Lepidoptera.

Possumhaw (Ilex decidua) is the holly that drops its leaves, and the leaf drop is the entire point. Where an evergreen holly hides its fruit behind foliage, possumhaw stands bare from late autumn through winter as a thicket of pale grey twiggy branches packed with orange-red drupes - Missouri Botanical Garden records them ripening in September and persisting until March, which is four to six months of display from a plant with no leaves on it. The cost is honest and worth stating first: for the other half of the year it is an unremarkable large shrub with obovate dark green leaves and dull white flowers Missouri Botanical Garden calls insignificant, and its autumn colour is a muddy purplish-green or a modest yellow rather than anything to plan around. The second cost is the group problem. Hollies are dioecious, so a lone female never fruits and a male never fruits at all - though possumhaw is the one species in this batch where that rule has a documented exception, since Missouri Botanical Garden states plants are "mostly dioecious ... but some plants have perfect flowers". It reaches 7 to 15 feet in cultivation, tolerates clay and urban conditions, and is listed for rain gardens. The name comes from the opossums that eat the fruit; birds, deer and small mammals take it too.