Spanish bayonet

Spanish dagger, also called mound lily yucca, is an evergreen yucca of coastal sand dunes, beaches and the borders of brackish marshes in the southeastern United States, from North Carolina to northern Florida. The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center calls it rare and local in the wild, yet it reached Europe around 1550 and is one of the most common yuccas in cultivation. Its sword-shaped, blue-grey to green leaves end in sharp tips, so where it goes is a decision, not a detail: keep it back from paths and play areas, or do as UF/IFAS suggests and shear the tips off where it stands near an entry. It grows slowly from a stemless rosette into a clump 6 to 8 feet tall and 4 to 8 feet wide on short, woody trunks, and sends up tall panicles of creamy white bells, often tinged red or purple. Wikipedia reports genetic evidence that it arose from hybrids between Spanish bayonet and Adam's needle. It takes salt spray, heat and drought, grows in zones 6 to 11, and the ASPCA lists yuccas as toxic to dogs, cats and horses.

A four-season native shrub of the southeastern United States, where NC State Extension notes it grows wild in moist woods and along stream banks. It is an upright, multi-stemmed deciduous shrub, slow-growing to roughly 4 to 8 feet tall and 4 to 10 feet wide, named for its large, oak-shaped, lobed dark-green leaves. Showy pyramidal 4-12 inch panicles of creamy-white flowers open from late spring into summer and fade to pink and then tan, while the bold foliage turns wine, orange, and mahogany in fall over peeling cinnamon bark. Easy and low-maintenance in organically rich, well-drained soil, it is grown as a specimen, in masses, or as an informal hedge.

Seven-son flower is a fast-growing deciduous shrub or small multi-stemmed tree native to cliffs and forest margins in Anhui and Zhejiang provinces of eastern China, where only about nine wild populations survive (IUCN Vulnerable). In gardens it earns its keep through an unusually long ornamental season: fragrant white flowers open in September, then the petals drop and the calyces swell and flush deep pinkish-red through October-November, extending the display well into autumn. The honest catch is size: it is genuinely vigorous and will reach 15 to 20 feet in a decade, making it unsuitable for small gardens unless committed to hard annual renewal pruning - and its spreading, suckering root system can colonize several feet beyond the canopy over time.

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

Cape honeysuckle (Tecomaria capensis, Bignoniaceae) is a vigorous, evergreen scrambling shrub from southern and south-central Africa, valued for tubular orange-to-apricot flowers borne erratically across much of the year. It reaches about 6.6 to 9.8 feet tall and wide as a free-standing shrub, or can be trained much taller on a trellis or wall, and is widely used for informal hedging and as a hot-color border or container plant. It is frost-tender (RHS H1C; roughly USDA 9b-11) - in cooler climates it is grown under glass or as a summer container plant and overwintered indoors. In frost-free, mild climates it can become weedy: it has naturalised and is treated as invasive in parts of Australia and on islands such as the Azores, so site it where suckering and self-layering can be managed. It is not a recognised edible and is not flagged as notably toxic, though several plant parts feature in traditional southern-African medicine; treat it as ornamental rather than for consumption. Note the accepted binomial here is Tecomaria capensis (POWO/GBIF); the widely-seen Tecoma capensis is a synonym.

The China rose of central and southern China, long known by the old name Rosa indica and also called Bengal rose, is the rose that taught garden roses to flower again and again. Trees and Shrubs Online describes the China roses as a race of garden roses, bred in Chinese gardens from wild plants, that bear successive crops of flowers on the same stem, which is why their Chinese name means Monthly Roses; through Pink China roses that reached Europe from about 1781 they are ancestors of most modern garden roses. NC State Extension describes a rounded, prickly, deciduous shrub 6 to 8 feet tall and wide, with clusters of four or five slightly fragrant flowers in white, pink, red or purple through the summer and red hips afterwards. It is a warm-temperate rose, listed for zones 6 to 9, and a demanding one: NC State calls it high maintenance, lists black spot, powdery mildew, rust and rose rosette disease among its problems, and says deer frequently damage it.