Sweet corn

A cool-season annual legume of the bean family (Fabaceae), also called broad bean, grown as a vegetable for its edible seeds and pods. NC State Extension describes a stiffly erect plant 2 to 6 feet tall with leaves of 2-6 leaflets and conspicuous toothed stipules, bearing fragrant white spring-and-summer flowers marked with a purplish or brown blotch. The fruit is a narrowly oblong flattened pod up to 11 inches long holding up to 6 large oval seeds. Like other legumes it fixes nitrogen from the air and is often used as a cover crop; it grows best in cool weather, with poor yields once daytime temperatures exceed the mid-70s.

A Mediterranean thistle relative grown as a perennial vegetable for its large, unopened flower bud - the edible "globe" of overlapping fleshy bracts harvested before bloom. It forms an upright clump of deeply lobed, jagged silver-green leaves, with flower stalks rising to 3 to 5 feet. Left unharvested, the buds open to spectacular violet-blue thistle flowers up to 7 inches across that are a magnet for bees. The two botanical authorities cited on this page disagree about its name: Kew's World Checklist treats the globe artichoke as a cultivated form of the cardoon, Cynara cardunculus subsp. cardunculus, while GBIF still lists Cynara scolymus as an accepted species. Cynara scolymus remains the name in general use, and it is the one used here.

A heat-loving annual of the mallow family (Malvaceae), native to the Old World tropics and grown for its edible seed pods - the backbone of gumbo. Plants reach 3 to 5 feet with showy hibiscus-like, single-day yellow flowers carrying a deep purple center. It thrives where summers are hot: seed should not go out until the soil reaches 60°F, and the first pods follow about 55 days after germination.

Achiote, also sold as annatto or lipstick tree, is a fast-growing evergreen shrub or small tree native from Mexico through Central America to Colombia, Venezuela, the Guianas, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and northern Argentina, and planted across the tropics for its seeds. Clusters of pink or white flowers about 2 inches across, like single wild roses, open at the branch tips and are followed by clusters of red to red-brown capsules covered in soft bristles, which split open to show seeds coated in a waxy red-orange layer. That coating is annatto: the coloring and mild seasoning behind achiote paste and sazón, the yellow-orange of many cheeses, butters, and margarines, and the red body paint and lipstick that gave the plant its English name. In a garden it usually stays 6 to 12 feet tall and wide as a specimen or informal hedge, though as a tree it can reach 20 to 30 feet. It is frost-tender and needs a frost-free climate: it is hardy outdoors in USDA zones 10a-12b and grown elsewhere in a large container or conservatory that comes indoors before frost. Outside its native range it has naturalized on many Pacific islands, sparingly so in Hawaii, and in the Galapagos, where the Charles Darwin Foundation rates it potentially invasive.

A native eastern + central North American thicket-forming shrub producing arching thorny canes + clusters of large sweet black berries in mid-to-late summer. Among the most important wildlife fruit producers in eastern forests - birds, mammals, + insects all depend on the fruit. Like raspberry, biennial-caned (primocane year 1, fruits in year 2 as floricane, then dies back). Spreads via root suckers + tip-rooting cane tips; manage with annual pruning.

A fast, suckering native shrub of streambanks and moist thickets across eastern North America, grown for huge flat-topped cymes of tiny lemon-scented white flowers in early summer and the clusters of dark elderberry drupes that follow. Spreads by root suckers into naturalized colonies 5 to 12 feet tall and wide; the flowers feed butterflies and the showy fruit feeds birds. The raw berries are not eaten fresh - they are cooked into jelly, pie, and wine.