Salad burnet

Shiso is a fast-growing Asian culinary herb in the mint family (Lamiaceae), native across a wide arc from the Himalayas through China, Japan, and Korea to Southeast Asia (Wikipedia; GBIF). In temperate gardens it is grown as a tender annual reaching 24 to 35 inches, prized for its aromatic, serrated leaves used in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese cooking. The honest catch is its aggressive self-seeding: shiso sets abundant seed in late summer and is designated a weed in parts of the United States, so deadheading before seed set is essential unless you want a permanent colony - and all parts are toxic to grazing livestock (perilla ketone).

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.

The iconic cornfield cornflower or bachelor's button - a slender, grey-green hardy annual carrying intense-blue (also pink, white, or purple in cultivars), fringed, thistle-like flowerheads from early to mid summer. POWO (Kew) places it native to southeastern Europe, the Balkans, and the eastern Mediterranean, naturalised across much of the temperate world as a cornfield archaeophyte. Honesty matters here: once a common cereal-field weed, the wild cornflower has DECLINED sharply across northern Europe under modern farming and is a genuine conservation concern there, even as it remains a beloved, easy, self-seeding cottage and meadow annual. Its blue florets are edible - a traditional garnish for salads, cakes, and teas. RHS gives several selections the Award of Garden Merit and rates the species fully hardy (H7). A strong nectar plant for bees and butterflies, it also bears extrafloral nectaries that feed ants and other insects.

An Old World cottage-garden annual grown for daisy- to chrysanthemum-like flowerheads (3 to 4 inches across) in bright yellow through deep orange, often with a contrasting darker center disk. In cool climates it blooms over a long summer-to-fall window; in hot summers it tends to languish and may need a midseason cutback to rebloom. The somewhat bitter flowers and lance-shaped aromatic leaves are edible, and the petals lend color to soups, rice, and baked goods.

A clumping perennial onion-relative forming dense grass-like tufts of hollow tubular leaves + globular lavender-pink flowerheads in late spring. Edible leaves + flowers; among the easiest perennial vegetables for beginners. Globular flowerheads are major early-season nectar sources for honey bees + native bees.

A low woody herb for sunny edges, between pavers, and herb-garden borders with pollinator-friendly summer flowers.