California bay laurel

Once the dominant canopy hardwood of the eastern United States forest - an estimated four billion trees, prized for fast growth, rot-resistant timber, and an enormous annual crop of sweet edible nuts that fed people, livestock, and wildlife alike. In the early 1900s an introduced Asian fungus, chestnut blight (Cryphonectria parasitica), swept through and functionally destroyed it: by the 1950s the species was effectively extinct as a mature forest tree. Surviving root systems still send up sprouts from old stumps, but the blight almost always girdles and kills them before they can grow large enough to flower and reproduce. The honest reality for a gardener is that you cannot reliably grow a mature wild-type American chestnut today. The realistic paths are blight-resistant backcross hybrids from The American Chestnut Foundation or transgenic blight-tolerant lines still being deployed - not a pure wild seedling, which the blight will almost certainly kill.

A tough, medium-sized native tree of the eastern and midwestern United States, grown as much for its showy edible orange fruit as for its distinctive thick, dark gray bark broken into rectangular blocks. Small urn-shaped white-to-greenish-yellow flowers open in May and June, and the sweet fruit ripens after frost. Largely dioecious - a female tree needs a male pollinizer nearby to set fruit - and notably drought- and walnut-tolerant once established.

A frost-tender broadleaf evergreen tree of the laurel family, native to Mexico and Central America and grown across the tropics and subtropics for its buttery, pear-shaped fruit. Glossy dark-green elliptic leaves 4 to 8 inches long clothe a tree that reaches 30 to 60 feet, hung with greenish-yellow flower panicles that give way to large single-seeded berries. Hardy only in USDA zones 10-12 - north of that it is an indoor curiosity easily sprouted from a pit, but one that rarely fruits.

An ancient Mediterranean fruit tree grown for millennia for its sweet, soft edible figs - a deciduous shrub (10 to 15 feet) or small tree (to 15 to 30 feet) with bold, deeply 3-5 lobed palmate leaves and smooth silver-gray bark that gnarls handsomely with age. Its tiny greenish flowers bloom hidden inside hollow receptacles that swell into the fruit; most cultivars are parthenocarpic, setting figs without pollination. Best in USDA Zones 8-10, it survives Zones 6-7 in sheltered, south-facing spots with winter protection or grown in containers moved indoors.

A small native understory tree of eastern North American forests producing the largest native fruit on the continent - a banana-custard-flavored tropical-tasting drupe in late summer. The canonical larval host for zebra swallowtail (Protographium marcellus, an Annonaceae specialist) per NC State; without pawpaw colonies the butterfly cannot reproduce. Self-incompatible - two genetically distinct trees are required for fruit set. Fly-and-beetle-pollinated via fetid maroon spring flowers.

The original quince - a deciduous, often multi-stemmed small tree or large shrub of the rose family from the Caucasus and western Asia, grown for its aromatic golden-yellow fruit rather than as an ornamental. Solitary, five-petaled pale-pink-to-white flowers open on the current season’s growth in mid to late spring, followed by showy round-to-pear-shaped fruit that ripens from gray-green to bright yellow in fall. Raw the fruit is hard, bitter, and astringent, but it sweetens and perfumes a kitchen once cooked into jellies, tarts, and cider. Not to be confused with the ornamental flowering quince (Chaenomeles).