Murray-Darling woodlands and mallee

A virtually stemless, broadleaf-evergreen native of central and eastern North America: a basal rosette of rigid, sword-shaped, spine-tipped leaves up to 30 inches long, fringed along the margins with the curly white threads that give the species its name. In early summer a flowering stalk shoots from the center to 5 to 8 feet, carrying nodding, bell-shaped, creamy-white flowers. Tough enough for poor sandy soil, heat, drought, and salt spray, it earns its keep as architectural structure in dry and seaside gardens.

A tall, summer-growing cormous perennial from across sub-Saharan Africa, grown for arching spikes of large, hooded, orange-to-red-and-yellow flowers in summer over fans of sword-shaped leaves. This is the widespread wild African gladiolus and a key ancestor of the big garden gladioli. Unlike the winter-growing Cape bulbs, it is a SUMMER-GROWING corm: plant in spring, grow and flower through summer, then it dies back to a dormant corm for winter. It wants full sun, well-drained soil, and summer moisture, and is one of the hardier species gladioli - surviving to about USDA zone 7 with a deep winter mulch or by lifting the corms in cold-winter areas. The corms are toxic and irritant if eaten and have been used in traditional medicine, never as food. In the wild the hooded flowers are pollinated by sunbirds and long-tongued insects.

A bold, clump-forming evergreen perennial from South Africa, grown for big rounded umbels of trumpet-shaped blue (or white) flowers held on tall bare stalks above arching, strap-shaped leaves in mid-to-late summer. It is widely sold as "lily of the Nile," but that is a misnomer - the plant is South African (the Cape provinces and KwaZulu-Natal), not from the Nile. Spectacular and easy in warm climates, this evergreen Agapanthus is frost-tender, so in cold-winter areas it is grown in a container and overwintered under cover. The RHS has given several Agapanthus praecox forms its Award of Garden Merit and rates this evergreen species half-hardy (H3 - needs winter protection).

A tall, bold warm-season annual from Mexico and Guatemala (the "African" name is a misnomer of its European garden history) grown for large, fully double, pompon-like flowerheads in saturated yellow, gold, and orange over strongly aromatic, finely divided foliage. Plants reach 1 to 4 feet and bloom from early summer to frost in full sun. The petals are edible and used as a culinary garnish and natural dye, and the flowers are the iconic "flor de muerto" of Mexican Day of the Dead. Despite the wide listed zone range it is frost-tender and grown for a single warm season.

A native Southeastern North American semi-evergreen woodland groundcover (Pachysandra procumbens), prized for its blue-green to bronze mottled leaves and fragrant white-to-pinkish bottlebrush flower spikes that open at ground level in late winter to early spring. Unlike the widely planted invasive Asian Pachysandra terminalis, this native spreads slowly by rhizomes into well-behaved clumping colonies, making it a low, restrained groundcover for shaded native plantings.

Aloe vera is a succulent perennial grown almost everywhere as an easy houseplant: a low rosette of thick, fleshy, toothed, grey-green leaves filled with the clear gel it is famous for. POWO (Kew) gives its native range as the Arabian Peninsula, though the exact wild origin is uncertain after millennia of cultivation, and it is now grown worldwide as the familiar medicinal aloe. Indoors it wants bright light or a sunny windowsill and very infrequent watering - it is highly drought-tolerant and rots if overwatered, which is the single most common way to kill it. Its uses are genuinely nuanced: the clear inner leaf gel is widely applied to skin (minor burns) and is consumed in aloe juices and drinks, but the yellow latex just beneath the rind is a powerful laxative and irritant that should not be casually eaten (and is best avoided in pregnancy), and the whole plant is toxic to cats and dogs. It is frost-tender and hardy outdoors only in roughly USDA zones 9b-11; everywhere colder it lives in a pot. RHS gives it the Award of Garden Merit as an easy succulent houseplant and rates it H1C. Its air-purifying reputation, drawn from a single 1989 NASA chamber study, is negligible at realistic room densities - grow it for the plant itself, not to clean your air.

Hippeastrum x hybridum is a complex garden hybrid derived from six or more wild Hippeastrum species native to tropical and subtropical South America, developed through intensive breeding since the late 18th century and now the dominant "amaryllis" sold worldwide as a holiday bulb. It produces spectacular trumpet-shaped flowers - 5 to 8 inches across - on stout leafless scapes in red, pink, white, orange, salmon, or bicolour, making it one of the most dramatic winter-flowering houseplants available. The honest catch is toxicity: the entire plant, especially the bulb, contains lycorine and related alkaloids at concentrations that cause vomiting, salivation, tremors, and hypotension in pets and children, so it must be placed out of reach and handled with care.

American beautyberry (Callicarpa americana) is a loose, open, arching deciduous shrub of the southeastern and south-central United States, grown almost entirely for one spectacular autumn trick. Through summer it is a quiet green background plant, carrying small clusters of pink-to-lilac flowers tucked into the leaf axils. Then, from late summer into fall, those clusters ripen into tight whorls of vivid magenta-purple berries that wrap right around the stems at every leaf joint, so the arching branches look strung with beads. Songbirds strip them through fall and early winter. It is an easy, fast-growing, forgiving native that asks for little: full sun to part shade, ordinary well-drained soil, and room to arch. Site it where the fall berry show can be seen, because in leaf and flower it is plain, and in fruit it is one of the most distinctive shrubs you can grow.

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.

The American elm is the great vase-shaped shade tree that once arched over Main Streets and town commons across eastern North America - a fast, extremely cold-hardy deciduous tree of 60 to 80 feet whose upright trunk divides into a fountain of high, spreading limbs that meet overhead to form a living cathedral ceiling. That iconic form, and the species' tolerance of wet soil and tough urban conditions, made it the default American street tree for a century. Then Dutch elm disease (DED) - an introduced fungal disease carried by elm bark beetles - swept through in the 20th century and killed the vast majority of mature street and shade elms across the continent. The honest reality for a gardener today is blunt: do not plant the unselected wild species expecting it to survive. If you want the American-elm form, plant a DED-tolerant cultivar bred and selected for resistance - 'Princeton', 'Valley Forge', 'New Harmony', or 'Jefferson' - and say so plainly. Where it does grow, it is fast, hardy to USDA zone 3, and remarkably forgiving of wet ground and city stress.

American germander, also called wood sage, is a widespread North American native perennial in the mint family that runs steadily underground on creeping rhizomes. From early to midsummer it sends up erect, softly hairy stems topped with one-sided spikes of pale pink-to-lavender flowers, each with the distinctive deeply lobed lower lip that gives the germanders their look and makes a generous landing platform for bees. It is a plant of moist open ground - wet meadows, streambanks, ditches, and the edges of thickets - across most of the contiguous United States into southern Canada, which tells you exactly what it wants: sun and a soil that does not dry out. The honest caveat is its vigor: those same rhizomes that fill a bank or a rain garden so readily will also colonize a tidy perennial border and crowd politer neighbors. Site it where it can run, or give it a root barrier, and it rewards you with a long, dependable bee-friendly bloom rather than a maintenance fight.

A rounded, multi-stemmed deciduous shrub native across eastern and central North America, grown for its edible nuts and its season-opening catkins. Showy 2-3 inch yellowish-brown male catkins dangle from bare branches in early spring before the ovate, double-toothed leaves emerge; small egg-shaped edible nuts ripen inside leafy husks by mid- to late summer. Easygoing in average soil and tolerant of clay and black walnut, it suckers into thickets that screen and shelter wildlife.

The only native U.S. holly with both spiny green leaves and bright red berries - an upright, pyramidal, broadleaf evergreen tree that slowly matures to 15 to 30 feet in cultivation (to 50 feet in the wild). Thick, leathery, deep green leaves bear spiny marginal teeth, and pollinated female trees carry showy red-to-orange drupes that ripen in fall and persist through winter as bird food. This is the classic "Christmas holly" of wreaths and decorations.

A small-to-medium understory tree of dry, rocky eastern-North-American woods, named for its drooping clusters of papery, sac-like seed pods that resemble the fruit of hops. The birch-like, sharply-serrated leaves turn an undistinguished yellow in fall, and reddish-brown male catkins persist on the bare branches through winter. Also called ironwood for its extremely hard, dense wood; tough, low-maintenance, and drought-tolerant once established.

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 native canopy tree of eastern North American forests with iconic star-shaped 5-lobed leaves displaying outstanding red-purple-orange fall color, distinctive corky wing-bark on twigs, and spiky round seed pods that famously litter lawns ("gumballs"). The seed pods are the design-defining drawback - Liquidambar is rarely planted in formal landscapes for this reason. Choose seedless cultivars ('Rotundiloba', 'Slender Silhouette') for residential planting.

A massive native deciduous canopy tree of eastern North American floodplain forests producing distinctive mottled white-tan-gray exfoliating bark (the design-defining trait - sycamore bark looks like military camouflage), large palmate maple-like leaves, and persistent spherical seed balls. Among the largest deciduous trees in eastern North America - old-growth specimens exceed 150 feet tall + 10 feet trunk diameter. Site only where massive scale is acceptable.

Dierama pulcherrimum, angel's fishing rod, is an arching, more-or-less evergreen cormous perennial in the iris family (Iridaceae), endemic to the open summer-rainfall grasslands of the Eastern Cape of South Africa. It forms grassy tufts of long, narrow leaves from which tall, wiry, arching flower stems rise to about 4.9 feet (occasionally to 5.9 feet), each hung with pendulous, bell-shaped rosy-pink to purple flowers in summer - the namesake "fishing rod" silhouette over a pond or in a gravel garden. It is the load-bearing caution to note that this is only a borderline-hardy plant: RHS rates it H4 (hardy to roughly 14 to 23°F / USDA ~8b-9), so in colder zones it needs a sheltered, sunny, sharply drained spot, a winter mulch, or container/glasshouse protection, and it resents disturbance once established. It is not recorded as toxic - though it is grown purely as an ornamental and is not a food plant, so treat it as inedible. It is well-behaved (Least Concern in the wild, no recorded weediness) and suits borders, pond margins, and containers in mild-temperate gardens.

Angel's trumpet (Brugmansia suaveolens) is a large, soft-wooded shrub or small tree hung with enormous pendulous trumpet flowers - up to 12 inches long, white aging to soft blush, and intensely fragrant in the evening and at night. Native to the Atlantic Forest of south-eastern Brazil (POWO, Kew; Flora e Funga do Brasil), it is now classified Extinct in the Wild by the IUCN and survives only in cultivation, which makes a familiar garden plant quietly remarkable. It grows fast and thirsty in warmth (USDA zones 9b-11b) and is frost-tender, so in cold-winter areas it is grown in a large container and overwintered under cover. The load-bearing warning is its toxicity: EVERY PART IS HIGHLY TOXIC, loaded with tropane alkaloids (scopolamine, atropine, hyoscyamine), and poisonings can be severe or fatal - never plant it where children or pets could reach it.

A native eastern-US deciduous shrub - 'Annabelle' is a sterile-flowered cultivar of smooth hydrangea - with very large white snowball blooms in summer. Blooms on new wood so spring frost cannot destroy the flower display, and serves as the larval host for the hydrangea sphinx moth.

Armand clematis is a vigorous evergreen climbing shrub native to much of China (except the north and extreme south) and northern Myanmar, grown for its profusion of almond-scented, star-shaped white flowers in early spring (March-April) on the previous season's wood. It excels as a structure-covering climber on sheltered walls, pergolas, and fences, providing year-round glossy, deep-green foliage. The honest catch is its rampant vigor: in a favored site it can overwhelm host structures within a few years, sheds masses of dead leaves through the year (a persistent litter problem), and all parts are toxic to cats, dogs, and horses (and the sap irritates skin) - and it is only reliably hardy to about USDA zone 7b with the shelter of a warm wall, making it a borderline plant anywhere colder.

A deciduous Eastern-Asian fruit tree with a rounded, spreading crown that the Missouri Botanical Garden lists at 20 to 30 feet tall and wide. Oval leaves emerge yellowish-green, mature to glossy green, and turn gold to red in fall; fragrant but insignificant late-spring flowers give way to showy orange persimmons (3 to 4 inches) that ripen in late fall and may persist on bare branches into winter. Winter hardy to USDA Zones 7-10 and drought tolerant once established.

A long-lived herbaceous perennial vegetable grown for the tender young spears harvested in April and May before they unfurl. Native to Europe and temperate Asia, it grows from a crown that takes 2-3 years to come into production but then yields for fifteen years or more. Spears left uncut grow into airy 3-4 foot summer ferns; the plants are dioecious, and female plants ripen ornamental red berries in late summer.

Atlas cedar is a large, long-lived evergreen conifer native to the Rif and Atlas Mountains of Morocco and the Tell Atlas of Algeria, where it forms forests at 3,839 to 7,218 feet elevation (Wikipedia). In cultivation it develops a stately, broadly conical to flat-topped crown with silver-blue to grey-green needles, reaching 98 to 115 feet tall - a genuinely majestic specimen tree for large gardens and parkland. The honest catch is scale: this is not a suburban garden tree. It grows too large for most plots, casts dense, permanent shade beneath its canopy, and drops barrel-shaped cones that can be heavy and messy. Surface roots lift paving and outcompete underplanting once the tree matures.

A fast cool-season annual of the mustard family grown for its peppery, mustard-like salad greens - irregular, pinnately-lobed basal leaves in a low rosette, each with 4 to 10 small lateral lobes and a large terminal lobe (Missouri Botanical Garden). First cultivated by the ancient Greeks and Romans and still widely grown across Europe, it is best grown in the cooler spring and fall months rather than summer heat; leaves are harvested young and tender before they turn strong and bitter. Pale-yellow four-petalled flowers with dark brown or purple veins appear in corymbs if plants are left to bloom.

A cool-season Asian leaf vegetable grown for its loose, non-heading rosette of dark-green leaves carried on broad, juicy white stalks - the spoon-shaped petioles that distinguish it from heading cabbages. Missouri Botanical Garden PlantFinder records that the group spans varieties from 3 to 4 inches to 24 inches tall and is edible at every stage, from seedlings to small immature heads to large mature heads and even while flowering. The stems are mild and juicy while the leaves carry a cabbage-like flavor; like other brassicas it tolerates light frosts but bolts in summer heat.

A cool-season vegetable grown for its large, tight, terminal head of green flower buds on a thick edible stem, framed by waxy blue-green leaves. Grown as an annual; it grows poorly once daytime temperatures consistently exceed 80°F, so it is timed for spring and fall. Harvest promptly while the head is firm and tight, before the buds begin to open.

A slow-growing, long-season cool-weather vegetable grown for the miniature cabbage-like buds (1 to 2 inches wide) that form in the leaf axils along a single 2-3 foot stem. It is the same species as kale, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and kohlrabi, differing only by cultivar group. Flavor improves after the first fall frost, so it is timed for a cool-temperature autumn harvest rather than summer heat.

A cool-weather leaf vegetable grown for its dense, edible head of tightly wrapped blue-green, red, or wrinkled (Savoy) leaves. A biennial almost always grown as an annual, it forms a 3-4 pound head in about 80 days and rarely flowers in cultivation. It shares its species with kale, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, and kohlrabi, and grows poorly once daytime temperatures stay above 80°F.

A cool-weather brassica grown for the large, tight head of aborted white flower buds - the "curd" - that forms at the center of a rosette of broad blue-green leaves. The same species as cabbage, broccoli, kale, Brussels sprouts, and kohlrabi, it is harvested before the curd ever opens into true flowers. Grown as an annual; notoriously fussy, with little tolerance for heat, drought, or cold, it does best in the cool temperatures of spring and fall.

A warm-weather annual of the carrot family grown in herb gardens for two distinct crops from one plant: the lacy, strong-scented foliage harvested young as cilantro, and the aromatic dried seed harvested as coriander. The plant bolts and flowers quickly in hot weather, throwing up showy white-to-pale-lavender umbels and a marked leaf dimorphism - broad scalloped lower leaves give way to fine, thread-like upper foliage on the flowering stems. Fast and easy from a direct sowing, it is best succession-planted for a steady leaf harvest before heat triggers bolting.

The cultivated cereal oat, an erect cool-season annual grass grown for grain, forage, and - increasingly in gardens - as a fast, soil-building cover crop. From a spring or late-summer sowing it shoots up to 2 to 4 feet of slender, upright culms topped by an open, airy seed head (a spreading panicle) whose dangling spikelets ripen from green to gold. Domesticated in the Old World from wild oats, it is not a native wildflower but a true annual crop: it germinates fast, smothers weeds, builds biomass, and in cold zones conveniently winter-kills to leave an easy mulch in spring. Gardeners reach for it most as a green manure and erosion-stopping nurse crop, and for the soft, grassy texture and ripening-gold seed heads it adds while it grows.

A productive cool-season edible Brassica (a wild-cabbage cultivar in the Acephala / non-heading group, alongside collards). Upright blue-green strap-shaped leaves with strong kitchen-garden value and ornamental texture; grown as a cool-season annual or short-lived biennial.

A cool-season onion-family vegetable grown not for a bulb but for its thick, mild, blanched white stalk - a tight cylinder of leaf bases capped by a fan of flat, blue-green, strap-like leaves. A biennial that flowers only rarely in cultivation, leek is grown in U.S. gardens as an annual and gardeners trench or mound soil around the stems to lengthen the sweet white portion. The stalk and leaves carry a delicate, sweet, mild oniony flavor without the pungency of most onions.

The world’s fourth most important food staple - a cool-season nightshade grown as an annual for the starchy tubers that swell underground on stolons. Above ground it makes a bushy, knee-high mound of compound pinnate leaves topped, briefly, by white-to-purple star-shaped flowers with a bright yellow anther cone. The tubers are the only part eaten: leaves, stems, fruit, and any green-skinned tuber carry the toxic glycoalkaloid solanine.

A fast cool-season root vegetable in the mustard family (Brassicaceae), grown for its crisp, peppery swollen root and edible greens. Believed to originate in Southern Asia, where truly wild forms have been found; Greek and Roman writers were describing mild, biting, round, and long types by antiquity. Sown directly in spring and fall, it is one of the quickest crops to harvest - pulled young before the root turns woody and the plant bolts to a 2-3 foot stalk of small white-to-pale-violet flowers.

A fast, cool-season leafy annual grown for its tender, vitamin-rich basal rosette of leaves - an excellent source of vitamins A, B, and C plus iron and phosphorus per the Missouri Botanical Garden. Cultivated in Europe since the 1400s and probably native to western Asia, it crops best in the cool temperatures of spring and fall and bolts (sends up greenish-yellow flower spikes of no ornamental value) once summer heat arrives, after which the leaves deteriorate.

A fast, cool-season root vegetable grown for both its swollen storage root and its peppery greens. The familiar form is a round white globe with a purple-to-magenta shoulder where the crown meets sun and air, tapering to a slender taproot below a rosette of bristly green leaves. Best harvested young - two inches or less across - because flavor turns sharply more pungent as the root enlarges and as growing conditions dry out.