Western Great Lakes forests

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 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 dense, conical-to-narrow-pyramidal evergreen tree native to eastern and central North America, prized as a screening and foundation conifer. Flat, fan-like sprays of scale-like, aromatic yellow-green foliage clothe the tree from the ground up, and red-brown bark exfoliates on mature trunks. Wild trees can reach 40 to 60 feet but cultivated plants typically stay near 20 to 30 feet; small urn-shaped cones and dense evergreen cover make it valuable food and shelter for birds.

A medium-to-large native shade tree of central and eastern North America, reaching 50 to 80 feet with an ovate-rounded crown and large, asymmetric heart-shaped leaves. In June it carries pale-yellow, intensely fragrant flowers on pendulous cymes - each cluster hung from a distinctive strap-like leafy bract - that ripen into pea-sized nutlets. The fragrant June bloom is a premier nectar source: Missouri Botanical Garden lists it as attracting bees and butterflies, and the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center flags it as having special value to both native and honey bees.

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.

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 small native deciduous tree (or thicket-forming, suckering shrub) of eastern and central North America, grown for clouds of fragrant white 5-petaled flowers that open in March before the leaves and for the edible red plums that follow in early summer. It forms a broad, spreading crown with attractive dark reddish-brown twigs that sometimes carry thorny lateral branchlets. A documented larval host for swallowtails and other butterflies, with flowers of special value to native, bumble, and honey bees.

Amur maple (Acer ginnala, accepted by Kew's Plants of the World Online as Acer tataricum subsp. ginnala) is a small, fast-growing deciduous tree or large multi-stemmed shrub from northeastern Asia - the Russian Far East, northeastern China, and Korea. At 15 to 20 feet it fits where a full-size maple cannot, and it earns that place with three seasons of interest: fragrant greenish-yellow flowers in spring, which is an unusual scent for a maple and an early nectar source for bees; small glossy three-lobed leaves through summer; and reliable, often brilliant red-to-orange fall color that arrives early. It is also one of the hardiest maples, tolerant of cold, wind, dry soil, and a wide range of pH. The honest catch, and it is a serious one for North American gardeners, is that it self-sows prolifically and has escaped cultivation to become invasive across parts of the US Midwest and Northeast, where its shade-tolerant seedlings crowd native shrubs and understory trees in open woods, savannas, and prairies. Several states list it as invasive or a noxious weed. Check your local invasive-species list before planting, and be prepared to remove seedlings if you do.

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.

A native central + eastern US perennial with intensely aromatic foliage when crushed and dense clouds of small blue-purple flowers in late fall - often the latest-blooming aster in the eastern flora. Drought + clay tolerant; among the toughest native fall pollinator plants.

A native eastern + central North American multi-stemmed deciduous shrub with dentate (toothed) foliage, white spring flower clusters, blue-black drupes, and reliable fall color. Especially valued for wildlife - among the most-cited native shrubs for fall-migration bird forage.

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 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.

A clump-forming herbaceous perennial grown for its showy late-season flower heads: masses of tiny star-like flowers borne in flattened cymes 3 to 6 inches across that emerge rosy pink, deepen to rose-red, and fade to coppery-rust as they die. Gray-green, fleshy, succulent-like leaves form upright clumps to about 24 inches. Easily grown in dry-to-medium, well-drained soil in full sun, it is drought tolerant and attracts butterflies, and its foliage and dead inflorescences persist into winter for added interest.

Balloon flower is a long-lived East Asian perennial grown for its inflated, balloon-like buds that pop open into wide, five-petalled violet-blue (or white or pink) stars in mid- to late summer - one of the most distinctive bloom shapes in the border. Native to China, Korea, Japan, and the Russian Far East, it is bone-hardy (USDA zones 3a-9b) and largely trouble-free once established. The honest catch is its very late spring emergence: balloon flower is among the last perennials to surface, reappearing in late spring when other beds are already full, and its fleshy tap-like roots resent disturbance - mark it clearly, never move it, and resist the urge to poke around the crown before the shoots appear.

Balsam fir (Abies balsamea) is THE Christmas tree of the northeast and, for most gardens, a tree to admire rather than plant. Missouri Botanical Garden is unambiguous about why: the species is native to cool climates and is not recommended for planting in the hot and humid summer conditions south of USDA Zone 5, it is generally intolerant of urban pollution, and MBG explicitly does not recommend it for its own St. Louis climate. Wikipedia puts the same limit the other way round - it wants a mean annual temperature near 40°F with consistent moisture, and low moisture combined with high temperature is what stops the range. This is a boreal tree. It runs from Labrador and Newfoundland west to Alberta and south to Minnesota, Wisconsin, New England and New York, then survives in the Appalachians only by climbing, hanging on at 2,500 to 5,000 feet as far south as Virginia and West Virginia. Where it does suit the climate it is superb: a narrow aromatic spire of 50 to 70 feet and only 15 to 25 feet wide, clothed in flat blunt needles 0.6 to 1.2 inches long, dark green above with two chalk-white stomatal bands beneath and twisted at the base so they lie in two horizontal ranks either side of the shoot. Two features are worth learning by hand. The young bark is smooth and grey and studded with RESIN BLISTERS that spray when punctured - no spruce or pine does that - and the erect cones, 2 to 3 inches and dark purple, ripen brown and DISINTEGRATE on the branch in September, dropping their scales and leaving a bare central spike standing on the twig. A fir cone is therefore something you almost never find whole on the ground, which is the single fastest way to tell Abies from Picea. That resin is also the reason this tree has a place in the history of optics: Canada balsam, the oleoresin tapped from those bark blisters, dries to a transparent mass with a refractive index near 1.52, effectively the same as crown glass, so it worked as an invisible glue for cementing lens elements and became the standard mounting medium for microscope slides from about 1830. It was phased out during the Second World War for polyester, epoxy and urethane adhesives, which do not yellow and have far better thermal and solvent resistance. The honest catch list is long: balsam woolly adelgid, spruce budworm (this is the budworm's preferred main host), bark beetles, spider mites in hot spells, cankers, heart rot, root rot, needle rust and twig blight, plus heavy deer browsing, shallow roots that make it wind-firm only in a stand, and a working life measured in decades rather than centuries.

A low, densely branching coastal shrub of northeastern dunes, smothered in white spring blossom and prized for the tart blue-purple plums that follow. The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center documents it native from New Brunswick down the Atlantic seaboard to New Jersey, growing in sand and gravel near the sea, where it is both salt tolerant and drought tolerant. It carries Special Value to Native Bees, feeds birds with its fruit, and is self-incompatible - a second seedling is needed to set a real crop.

A circumboreal evergreen groundcover with small white-pink urn-shaped flowers, glossy leathery leaves, and bright-red bear-edible berries. One of the most reliable native evergreen groundcovers for cold sandy sites; widely used in northern landscapes for slope stabilization + low-maintenance native plantings.

The classic German or common-flag iris - the presumed parent of most modern bearded-iris cultivars, probably native to southern Europe and the Mediterranean and naturalized widely. Each stalk carries up to six large, usually fragrant flowers in spring: three erect lilac standards above three purple falls marked with brown veins, white bases, and the signature yellow "beard." It has no bulb, spreading instead by creeping rhizomes that form large clumps, with sword-shaped basal foliage to about two feet.

The largest native cherry of eastern North America - a medium-to-large deciduous shade tree that hangs elongated racemes of small white flowers in spring, then ripens drooping strings of pea-sized fruit from red to near-black in late summer. The fragrant white bloom feeds bees while the fruit is eaten by 33 species of birds and many mammals; it is also a workhorse larval host, supporting the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail and a string of giant silk and sphinx moths. Every part except the ripe fruit is cyanide-bearing and toxic.

A drought-and-flood-tolerant native shrub of eastern North America with brilliant three-season interest - spring white-pink flowers, glossy black antioxidant-rich late-summer berries, and brilliant wine-red fall foliage - plus an extraordinarily wide cold-hardiness range (USDA 3a-8b). The berries are astringent fresh but the basis of a small but growing commercial industry (juices, wines, jams, supplements) for their exceptionally high anthocyanin content. Spreads by suckers; site where colony formation is welcome.

Black cohosh (Actaea racemosa, long known as Cimicifuga racemosa) is a tall woodland perennial of eastern North American forests, grown for its dark, deeply divided foliage and its dramatic summer flower spikes. From a low mound of near-black-green, astilbe-like leaves about 2 to 3 feet high, slender stems shoot up to 4 to 8 feet and open wand-like white bottlebrush racemes of fluffy, petalless, stamen-packed flowers that light up shade when little else is blooming. It wants what a forest floor gives it: shade or morning-only sun, and deep, rich, steadily moist soil. The flowers carry a strong, sweet-but-fetid smell up close that draws flies, gnats, and small beetles, which is the root of the old name bugbane. It also has a long history in herbal medicine for womens health, but that is medicinal use with real cautions, not a garden edible.

Black oak (Quercus velutina) is the dry-ridge oak of eastern North America - a red-group tree of 50 to 60 feet that colonises the upland hills, slopes and gravelly ridges where richer oaks give up. Two things identify it and both are worth knowing, because the leaf alone is unreliable: the mature bark is hard and blocky, broken into deep furrows, and dark grey to nearly black on shaded and older trunks - though a sunlit trunk often reads plain grey-brown, so the name oversells the colour. Cut into that bark and the inner layer is a startling yellow-orange. That inner bark is the historical point of the tree - it was the source of quercitron, a commercial yellow dye traded out of North America from the 1770s onward, and it is why the species carries an economic history that its plain garden reputation does not suggest. As a garden tree it is an honest, undemanding, long-lived shade oak with good russet-red autumn colour and heavy wildlife value, hardy across an unusually wide zone 3 to 9 range. The catch is the taproot: black oak resents transplanting more than most oaks, so it is a tree to plant small and leave alone rather than to move in as a specimen.

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 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.

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.

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 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 bramble (cane) producing red aromatic edible fruit in summer or fall (depending on summer-bearing vs everbearing cultivar). Self-pollinating; spreads vigorously by root suckers + tip-rooting canes. NC State documents extensive Lepidoptera + small mammal + bird wildlife value alongside the edible fruit role. Site where the spreading habit is welcome - naturalized colonies form in sun-exposed open ground.

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.

An upright, clump-forming perennial of the mint family native to the upper Midwest, Great Plains, and into central Canada, named for its anise-scented foliage. From June through September it carries dense terminal spikes of lavender-to-purple two-lipped flowers above square stems and opposite, toothed leaves. The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center flags it as a nectar source with special value to native bees, bumble bees, and honey bees, and it also draws butterflies and hummingbirds.

The domesticated orchard apple - a deciduous Rosaceae tree grown for its showy, edible fruit and fragrant April blossom of five white-to-pink petals around a ring of yellow stamens. Not native to North America (the genus Malus spans Europe, Asia, and North America, but the cultivated apple is an Old World hybrid lineage). Almost all varieties are self-incompatible: a second, different apple cultivar blooming at the same time must be nearby for fruit to set, and trees are grown on dwarf, semi-dwarf, or standard rootstocks that decide final size.

A small deciduous Rosaceae fruit tree grown for its golden-orange, red-blushed drupes - fragrant, showy, edible, and ripening in summer. Fragrant white flowers (pink in bud) open in early spring before the foliage, two weeks ahead of peaches. That early bloom is also its weakness: the flowers are extremely susceptible to frost injury, so apricots are notoriously hard to crop reliably outside sheltered sites.

Arkansas blue star (Amsonia hubrichtii), also called threadleaf bluestar or Hubricht's bluestar, is a clump-forming native perennial from a tiny wild range in the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas and Oklahoma that has become one of the most dependable foliage perennials in temperate gardens. It builds a soft, rounded, knee-to-waist-high mound of upright stems clothed in very fine, needle-like, thread-thin leaves, so the whole plant reads as a feathery green cloud through summer. In late spring the stem tips carry loose clusters of small, pale powder-blue, five-pointed star flowers, a quiet but pretty show that draws butterflies and other pollinators. Its headline act comes in autumn, when the fine foliage turns a clear golden-amber that lights up the border and earned it the Perennial Plant Association Plant of the Year for 2011. It wants full sun to part shade and is famously tough, adaptable, and deer-resistant, though it will flop open in too much shade or overly rich soil, so give it sun and a light shearing after bloom if you want it to stay upright.

Asiatic hybrids are the easiest lilies to grow and among the first to bloom - rigid, unbranched 3-4 foot stems carry large, mostly upward- and outward-facing flowers 4 to 6 inches wide in nearly every color but blue, often with dark basal spotting. The flowers are showy and good for cutting but, unlike most other lily groups, usually have little or no fragrance. Every part of the plant is dangerously toxic to cats.

Aubrieta (Aubrieta deltoidea) is a low, mat-forming evergreen perennial in the mustard family (Brassicaceae), native to the rocky hillsides of southeastern Europe - primarily Greece, the Aegean Islands, Crete, and adjacent Mediterranean coasts. It is one of the most reliable spring-flowering ground covers for sunny, well-drained spots: cascading sheets of violet to deep pink four-petalled blooms from March through May, attractive to bees and bee flies. The honest catch is that without a hard cut-back immediately after flowering, plants become woody and bare in the centre within two or three years, collapsing from a tight carpet into a tired, gappy mat.

Austrian pine (Pinus nigra), also called European black pine, is a dense, dark, 40-to-60-foot conifer from central and southern Europe into western Asia, with stiff dark green needles three to six inches long in bundles of two and bark that darkens to nearly black on mature trunks. For most of the twentieth century it was the default tough conifer of North American landscapes: it takes clay, drought, salt and city air, and Missouri Botanical Garden still lists urban tolerance among its attributes. That reputation is now out of date, and the reason is a disease. Sphaeropsis - Diplodia - tip blight kills the new shoots from the bottom of the tree upward, hollowing out the crown over years, and it is severe enough that Missouri Botanical Garden explicitly no longer recommends planting Austrian pine in the St. Louis area or the wider Midwest. Dothistroma needle blight and pine wilt nematode compound it. It remains a legitimate choice on the drier, cooler, less humid end of its range; specifying it into a humid continental summer is planting a tree with a known ending.

Colchicum autumnale is a corm-forming herbaceous perennial native to lowland grassy meadows across much of Europe, from Portugal and Great Britain east to Ukraine. In autumn it sends up naked goblet-shaped flowers of lilac-pink directly from the bare soil - leaves and seedpods follow in spring and die back by early summer. The honest catch is its extreme toxicity: every part of the plant contains colchicine, a compound lethal to humans and animals, and the broad strap-like spring leaves are routinely mistaken for edible wild garlic - a potentially fatal confusion. Despite the common name, it is not a true crocus (Crocus, Iridaceae) but a member of the Colchicaceae.

A long-lived, pyramidal deciduous conifer of southeastern North American swamps, bayous, and riverbanks - same family as the redwoods, but "bald" because it drops its soft, feathery, two-ranked needles each fall after a coppery display. Trunks flare into a buttressed base, and trees standing in water often raise the knobby "knees" that make this species unmistakable. Despite its swamp reputation it grows very well in ordinary, even somewhat dry, upland soil, which makes it a tough, large-scale shade tree for parks, lawns, and rain gardens.

Epimedium grandiflorum (large-flowered barrenwort, bishop's hat) is a deciduous woodland perennial native to Japan and Korea, valued for its delicate long-spurred spring flowers in pink, white, purple, or yellow and its copper-flushed heart-shaped foliage. It thrives in dappled shade under trees and shrubs, tolerates dry shade once established, and is rarely browsed by deer or rabbits. The honest catch is patience: it is genuinely slow to establish, spreading only modestly from its shallow rhizomes, and the early spring flowers are vulnerable to late frost damage - gardeners expecting quick ground cover are regularly disappointed in the first two to three seasons.

A large, vigorous, fountain-shaped deciduous shrub that earns its common name in late spring, when its arching stems are smothered in masses of pale-pink, yellow-throated, bell-shaped flowers. Native to China, it is one of the great old-fashioned spring shrubs - spectacular in full bloom, much loved by bees, and offering peeling brown bark for quiet winter interest. It is also genuinely big: expect 6 to 10 feet tall and wide at maturity, so give it room rather than fighting its size with the shears. The form to seek out is the Award-winning "Pink Cloud", which carries a clearer, richer pink than the variable seed-grown species.

The signature grass of the North American tallgrass prairie - a tall, deep-rooted warm-season bunchgrass named "turkey-foot" for its three-parted purplish-red seedheads. Blue-green summer foliage rises 4 to 8 feet and turns maroon-tan for fall and winter. Deeply drought- and erosion-resistant once established; a larval host for skipper butterflies and cover for two dozen songbird species.

A vigorous, semi-evergreen, clump- and colony-forming hardy geranium grown as one of the best groundcovers for dry shade under trees and shrubs. Its soft, deeply lobed, strongly aromatic leaves form a dense, weed-smothering carpet, many of them flushing red and bronze in autumn, and above the foliage rise loose clusters of magenta-pink (or white) flowers with prominent protruding stamens in late spring and early summer. It spreads steadily by thick surface rhizomes into a tough, low-maintenance, weed-proof mat that is easy to pull back and is not aggressively invasive. The aromatic foliage makes it markedly deer- and rabbit-resistant, and it is genuinely drought-tolerant once established. It is grown purely as an ornamental and is not a food plant.

Black elder (Sambucus nigra) is a fast, tough, wildlife-rich deciduous shrub native across Europe, north Africa and western Asia (POWO). It earns its place twice a year: broad flat creamy-white flower umbels scent the garden in early summer, then drooping clusters of small black berries ripen in late summer to feed birds in quantity. RHS gives the ornamental forms (e.g. "Black Lace") the Award of Garden Merit and rates the species fully hardy (H6). It is also one of the classic foraging shrubs - the flowers and the COOKED ripe berries are much-used for elderflower cordial and for elderberry syrup, wine and jam. The honest catch is real: the raw berries, and the leaves, bark, stems and roots, are toxic (cyanogenic glycosides) and cause nausea and vomiting, so berries must always be cooked and never eaten raw or unripe. Vigorous to the point of suckering and seeding about, elder is a wildlife and hedgerow plant first, an ornamental second.