Northern Pacific Alaskan coastal 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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Red pine (Pinus resinosa) is the straight-trunked northern pine of sandy hills and glacial plains, 50 to 80 feet tall and only 20 to 25 feet wide, with a conical crown, horizontal branching and bark that is genuinely red-tinged from crown to base - which is where the name comes from, since the needles are ordinary dark green. It carries two of the cleanest identification tests in the genus. The needles are four to six inches long in bundles of two, and they are brittle in a specific way: bend one and it snaps crisply in half rather than folding, which no other pine in its range does. It is the tree of the great Depression-era plantations across the Upper Midwest and Ontario, planted in rows on sand that had been logged and burned, and much of what looks like red pine forest is that planting. The honest limit is heat. Missouri Botanical Garden rates it zones 2 to 5 and does not recommend it for landscape planting south of zone 5, because hot humid summers defeat it - this is a tree for cold winters and cool summers, and nowhere else.

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.

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 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.

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.

The familiar European blackberry, a vigorous arching thorny deciduous bramble that forms dense thickets and bears clusters of large sweet black aggregate berries in mid-to-late summer. Rubus fruticosus is not a single plant but a species AGGREGATE of many closely related microspecies, long cultivated for its fruit. HONEST CAUTION: while the berries are edible and excellent, the European blackberry aggregate is a load-bearing INVASIVE in many temperate regions. It and the closely related Himalayan blackberry (Rubus armeniacus) escape gardens into dense, impenetrable, thorny thickets that smother native vegetation, and are serious noxious weeds across the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere. Where it is invasive, plant a regionally-appropriate native bramble (Plotwright carries the native Allegheny blackberry, Rubus allegheniensis) or a sterile/thornless cultivated cultivar instead.

A compact, mounding deciduous shrub bred in the 1930s by crossing the East Asian species Caryopteris incana (southern China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan) and C. mongholica (Siberia, Mongolia, northern China) - it has no wild range of its own. Its defining virtue is a flush of vivid blue-to-violet flowers on the current year's growth in late summer and early fall, a period when little else in the garden blooms, combined with aromatic gray-green foliage and exceptional drought tolerance once established. The honest catch is its borderline hardiness at the cold edge of its range: in zones 5–6 the woody stems routinely die to the ground in winter and the plant resprouts from the base each spring, behaving more like an herbaceous perennial than a shrub - gardeners in those zones should hold back pruning until new growth confirms the crown has survived.

A deciduous shrub grown almost entirely for its explosion of yellow four-lobed flowers that line the bare arching stems in early spring, before the leaves emerge. A garden hybrid of two Asian species (Forsythia suspensa × F. viridissima) - not native to North America. Missouri Botanical Garden describes it as a "one-season wonder" that fades into the background after bloom, so it earns its place as a late-winter color signal rather than a four-season anchor.

An arching, multi-stemmed deciduous-to-semi-evergreen shrub grown for its long, cone-shaped summer-to-frost panicles of small, honey-scented flowers in purple, magenta, pink, or white. Native to central and western China, it is one of the most magnetic adult-butterfly NECTAR plants you can grow in a hot, sunny border. The honest catch: despite the name it hosts no native butterfly larvae, so it feeds adults but raises none - and the straight species is invasive, escaping along rivers and disturbed ground. Grow it for nectar with eyes open: deadhead it, choose a sterile cultivar, and back it with true native host plants.

A pyramidal-to-rounded deciduous flowering tree once planted everywhere as a fast, tidy street and lawn tree (above all the 'Bradford' cultivar), prized for a smothering cloud of white early-spring flowers, glossy summer leaves, and reliably brilliant red-to-purple fall color. Plotwright does not recommend planting it. It is now a recognized INVASIVE that is banned or being phased out in a growing number of states (Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and others) because cross-pollinated cultivars produce fertile seedlings that escape into dense, thorny wild thickets that smother native plants. The flowers also smell unpleasantly fishy up close, and 'Bradford' has notoriously weak branch unions that split apart in storms by 15-25 years old. Choose a native flowering tree instead - serviceberry (Amelanchier) or eastern redbud (Cercis canadensis) give you the same spring show without the ecological cost.

A widespread native North American perennial with plumes of bright yellow flowers in late summer + fall - among the most ecologically critical late-season pollinator plants. Spreads aggressively by rhizomes; site where the spreading habit is welcome (meadows, restorations) rather than tight borders.

Chinese silver grass (Miscanthus sinensis) is one of the most popular of all ornamental grasses: a large, clump-forming, warm-season grass that builds a fountain of arching, narrow leaves and then crowns it in late summer and autumn with showy, silvery-pink to coppery, feathery plumes held well above the foliage. As the season turns, the plumes fade to a soft, pale silver and the whole clump dries to warm tan, standing right through winter to give superb autumn colour and bold, four-season structure. POWO (Kew) places it as native to East Asia - China, Japan, and Korea - and it carries one load-bearing honesty caveat into the garden: the straight species self-seeds and is invasive across much of the eastern and central United States, listed as invasive or discouraged in many states. So plant a sterile or low-seeding named cultivar, deadhead the plumes before the seed ripens, and never plant it near wild or natural areas. Cut the old foliage to the ground in late winter before new growth begins.

A massive, fast-growing deciduous woody vine from China, famous for its mid-spring curtains of fragrant, lavender-to-violet (sometimes white) pea-like flowers hanging in long, dense racemes that open all at once before the leaves fully expand. The display is genuinely spectacular - but Chinese wisteria is one of the most aggressive ornamental vines in cultivation, and across the southeastern United States it has escaped gardens to become seriously INVASIVE, twining up and GIRDLING trees, smothering whole canopies, and forming dense thickets that crowd out native plants. It is extremely vigorous, twines counterclockwise with great force, and demands very sturdy support, hard annual pruning, and constant vigilance to keep it off houses, gutters, and trees. The seeds and pods are TOXIC if eaten. For most gardeners the honest recommendation is to plant the native American wisteria (Wisteria frutescens) instead - it gives a similar flowering effect with a fraction of the aggression and none of the invasive ecological cost.

Chinkapin oak (Quercus muehlenbergii) is the limestone oak, and that one fact is why it matters. Almost every oak worth planting wants acid soil and turns yellow on lime; this white-group tree of 40 to 60 feet does the opposite, growing naturally on dry alkaline rocky ground and adapting readily to the high-pH, compacted, rubble-filled soils of a built-up site. Missouri Botanical Garden records it as highly adaptive to urban conditions, and it is still described as uncommonly cultivated - a mismatch between how useful it is and how often it is planted. Its leaves are narrow and oblong, four to seven inches long, glossy green and edged with coarse sharp teeth rather than lobes, which is where the chinkapin name comes from. It is drought-tolerant, low-maintenance and long-lived. Two honest caveats: the autumn colour is undistinguished yellow and brown, and Missouri Botanical Garden notes it may take 30 years to bear its first acorns.

Clary sage (Salvia sclarea) is a big, aromatic, short-lived perennial or biennial of the northern Mediterranean and western Asia, grown as much for its bold architecture as for its scent. In its second summer it throws up branching spikes to about 3 to 4 feet, clothed not so much in the small lilac-to-white flowers as in large, showy, papery bracts in pink, mauve, and cream that hold their colour for weeks. The whole plant is powerfully aromatic, and it is the source of clary sage essential oil, long used in perfumery and as a muscatel-like flavouring for vermouths and wines. It wants full sun and sharp drainage, and because it is short-lived it relies on self-seeding to persist, so leave a few spikes to set seed if you want it to stay.

The classic broadleaf-evergreen shrub of formal hedges, topiary, and clipped borders - small, glossy dark-green opposite leaves on a dense rounded frame that takes shearing better than almost any other shrub. Native to southern Europe, western Asia, and northern Africa, it carries inconspicuous greenish-cream spring flowers and holds its leaves year-round. All parts are toxic if eaten and the foliage can cause skin irritation, but that same chemistry makes it reliably rabbit- and deer-resistant.

Common laburnum, or golden chain tree (Laburnum anagyroides), is a small deciduous tree of the mountains of central and southern Europe, growing 15 to 30 feet tall and famous for one spectacular moment: in May and June it drips with long, fragrant, pendulous chains of golden-yellow pea flowers. It is a classic ornamental - the material of the great laburnum arches - but it comes with a serious, load-bearing warning. Every part of the tree is poisonous. NC State rates its poison severity High and warns it "may be fatal if eaten"; the seeds, held in pea-like pods that children can mistake for edible peas, are the most dangerous part. Plant it for its beauty with clear eyes about siting it away from where children and livestock browse.

A low woody herb for sunny edges, between pavers, and herb-garden borders with pollinator-friendly summer flowers.

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.

Dawn redwood is a deciduous conifer native to a tiny relict population in wet montane valleys on the Hubei-Hunan-Chongqing border in south-central China - a living fossil unknown to science until 1941. In cultivation it is a fast-growing, broadly conical tree prized for feathery spring foliage, vivid cinnamon autumn colour, and shaggy russet bark. The honest catch is sheer scale: in a moist, open site it regularly exceeds 98 feet in 40-50 years, with a deep, aggressively spreading root system that makes it a poor fit for small gardens, close paving, or shallow soils.

Doublefile viburnum is a deciduous shrub native to China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, grown for its spectacular tiered, horizontal branching draped in flat lacecap flower heads in late spring. It earns its place as a four-season focal point - white flowers in May, blue-black drupes in late summer, and often vivid red-purple autumn colour - but the honest catch is its sheer footprint: mature plants can spread 13 to 16 feet wide with rigidly horizontal branches that resent hard pruning, and the fruit is not edible.