Tall verbena

A tall, sun-loving, drought-tolerant perennial in the daisy family, grown for its broad, flat-topped corymbs of tiny golden-yellow flowers held on stiff stems above finely divided, aromatic gray-green ferny foliage. Native to the Caucasus, Iran, and Afghanistan and long naturalized in gardens worldwide, it forms a tidy upright clump (rather than running like common yarrow) and is one of the most reliable, low-care pollinator and cut-flower plants for hot, dry, full-sun borders.

Creeping cotoneaster is a deciduous spreading shrub native to the mountains of central and southwestern China, Nepal, and Taiwan, prized for its distinctive flat herringbone branching, tiny pink-white summer flowers, and masses of vivid red autumn berries that sustain birds through winter. It holds the RHS Award of Garden Merit and tolerates poor, dry soils on banks and walls where little else will perform. The honest catch is twofold: the berries are mildly toxic to humans and pets (cyanogenic seeds, GI-irritant flesh), and the plant self-seeds freely enough that it is naturalising widely in the UK and Ireland and is considered potentially invasive - a real concern before planting near wild margins or hedgerows.

A widespread native perennial in the mint family with showy lavender flower heads through summer, distinctly more drought-tolerant than its cousin scarlet bee balm (Monarda didyma). Supports ruby-throated hummingbirds, hummingbird clearwing moths, three documented specialist bees, and provides stem-nesting bee shelter through winter.

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.