Eastern Cordillera Real montane forests

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).

Aji pepper is the South American chili species behind aji amarillo, Lemon Drop, Bishop's crown and Brazil's dedo-de-moça - one of the five domesticated chili peppers, and a different plant from the familiar garden pepper (Capsicum annuum) and the habanero (Capsicum chinense). It is a perennial shrub native from Colombia, Ecuador and Peru through Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, northern Argentina and central and southern Brazil, and where it can live for years it grows taller than most garden peppers, up to about 6.6 feet. Its white to cream flowers are typically marked with green or gold, and its fruits, which usually hang down in cultivated forms, come in an unusually wide range of shapes, from long tapered pods to the crown-shaped Bishop's crown. Heat runs from nearly heatless types to hot ones; aji amarillo is rated around 30,000-50,000 Scoville units. It is frost tender, so outside nearly frost-free climates it is grown as a warm-weather annual.

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.

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.

Bodnant viburnum is a garden hybrid (Viburnum farreri × V. grandiflorum) bred circa 1935 at Bodnant Garden in Wales, with no wild native range. Its signature appeal is intensely fragrant, deep-pink flower clusters that open on bare stems from November through March - a unique winter-to-early-spring performance that few shrubs can match. The honest catch is timing: those early flowers are highly frost-tender and a single hard freeze after they open can destroy an entire season's bloom, leaving the plant ornamentally ordinary until autumn foliage color arrives.

Flowering currant is a deciduous shrub native to the Pacific coast of western North America, from British Columbia south through Washington and Oregon to coastal California (as far south as Santa Barbara County), with a marginal inland presence in Idaho and a southern outpost on Guadalupe Island, Mexico. Its bold dangling racemes of deep-pink to crimson flowers open in early spring, often before the leaves, making it one of the most conspicuous late-winter shrubs in mild gardens. The honest catch is threefold: it is a confirmed alternate host of white pine blister rust (a serious pathogen of five-needled pines), its blue-black berries are edible but notably insipid, and it has become an established invasive weed in New Zealand (where it forms dense stands excluding native species) and is a more minor, localized weed in Tasmania.

Saucer magnolia is a deciduous garden hybrid - no wild range - created around 1820 by French horticulturist Étienne Soulange-Bodin by crossing Magnolia denudata with M. liliiflora at his estate near Paris (it first flowered in 1826). It is one of the most widely planted flowering trees in temperate gardens worldwide, prized for its spectacular goblet-shaped blooms in white, pink, and deep purple-rose that open on bare branches in early spring. The honest catch is its Achilles heel: the flowers emerge weeks before the last frost date across much of its hardiness range, and a single late-frost night after bud-break turns those magnificent blooms to brown mush - a reliable disappointment in zones 5 and 6 in the northern United States. Site under a south-facing wall or in a frost-sheltered hollow to gain even a few degrees of protection.

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.

Scadoxus multiflorus, the blood lily (also fireball lily, ball lily, powderpuff lily), is a summer-growing bulbous geophyte in the Amaryllidaceae, native across tropical and southern Africa to the southwestern Arabian Peninsula. Each bulb sends up a leafless stem topped by a dramatic globe-shaped umbel of scarlet flowers with protruding stamens, often before or alongside the foliage. It is a focal-point container and bedding bulb prized for its bold flower head, but it is decidedly tender - RHS rates it H1B (minimum 50 to 59°F), so outside roughly USDA zones 9b–11 it must be grown under glass or as a houseplant and dried off / overwintered frost-free. CRITICAL CAUTION: every part is toxic - Scadoxus contains poisonous alkaloids and has been used as a component of arrow and fishing poisons; the bulbs are ornamental, not edible, and the plant is harmful to people, pets, and grazing animals if ingested. Handle with gloves and keep away from children and animals.

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.

A fast-growing tropical woody shrub grown for its swollen, starchy storage roots - cassava, the mandioca of Brazil and one of the great staple foods of the tropical world. POWO (Kew) and Flora e Funga do Brasil record Manihot esculenta as native to and first domesticated in Brazil and the southern Amazon, the homeland of mandioca, manioc and tapioca. It forms a slender, upright shrub of palmately-lobed leaves on often red-tinged, jointed stems, and below ground it swells a cluster of long tuberous roots that are harvested, peeled and cooked. HONESTY (load-bearing): cassava is one of the most important food crops of the tropics, but the raw roots AND leaves contain cyanogenic glycosides (linamarin) and are TOXIC if eaten raw or under-processed - they must be peeled and properly cooked, and bitter varieties soaked and/or fermented, to drive off the cyanide before they are safe to eat. It is frost-tender (roughly USDA zone 9b and up) and drought-tolerant once established, which is exactly why it is such a dependable famine-insurance crop across the warm tropics.

Cherimoya is a small, fast-growing subtropical fruit tree of the custard-apple family, grown for one of the most prized fruits in the genus Annona: a heart-shaped to conical green fruit with a scaled or knobbly skin and snow-white, sweet, juicy flesh often compared to a cross between banana and pineapple. Kew records it as native to the Andes of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, and the name comes from the Quechua chirimuya, 'cold seeds', a nod to the cool highlands it favors. It grows 16 to 30 feet tall, drops its leaves briefly just before its fragrant spring flowers open, and starts bearing at about 3.5-5 years old. It is fussy about climate in both directions: a freeze a few degrees below 26°F can kill even a mature tree, while lowland tropical heat and humidity make it fail, so it belongs in mild, nearly frost-free subtropical or highland gardens (roughly zones 9b-11b). Its flowers switch from female to male within hours and few insects visit them, so growers usually hand-pollinate for a good crop. Eat only the ripe flesh: the seeds are poisonous if crushed or eaten, and the leaves, twigs and bark are not food either. It escapes from cultivation and has naturalized well outside its native range; Plants For A Future lists it as possibly invasive on Easter Island and in the Galapagos, Hawaii and New Zealand.

Veltheimia bracteata, the forest lily, is a winter-growing bulbous perennial from the forest margins and coastal scrub of South Africa's Eastern Cape, grown for its glossy rosette of wavy-edged strap leaves and a tall, dense raceme of pendent tubular flowers in shades of pink to rose, blooming in late winter through spring when little else is in flower. It is frost-tender (RHS H2): it tolerates cool conditions but not freezing, so outside roughly USDA zone 9b-11 it is grown as a container or conservatory bulb, dormant and dry through summer. It thrives in semi-shade with humus-rich, well-drained soil and makes an excellent pot specimen. The bird-pollinated flowers attract sunbirds. As a member of Asparagaceae (subfamily Scilloideae), it is grown for ornament only; the bulb is toxic and must not be eaten. It is well-behaved and not reported as invasive.

A fast, easy, productive evergreen large shrub or small tree from tropical America, grown across warm Brazil as the goiaba. It carries smooth, mottled, peeling bark, prominently veined leaves, and white flowers followed by the fragrant, vitamin-C-rich edible fruit. In frost-free climates (roughly USDA zones 9b-11b) it begins bearing within a few years and crops heavily and reliably, which is exactly why it has become a serious invasive weed in many tropical regions outside its native range. It is frost-tender and grown in the ground only where winters stay mild; bees do the pollinating.

Large white petunia is the wild South American species behind the garden petunia: a loose, spreading annual or tender perennial in the nightshade family (Solanaceae), native to the grasslands and rocky outcrops of Uruguay, southern Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina. Its pure white, funnel-shaped trumpets, 1 to 3 inches long, are the only white flowers in the genus, and they release a strong scent at night that draws hawkmoths. The garden petunia (Petunia x atkinsiana) is a hybrid of this species and Petunia integrifolia, but grown as itself it is a taller, looser, fragrant plant for the evening garden rather than a compact bedding mound. It is frost-tender: the RHS rates it H3, half-hardy to a winter minimum of 23°F to 34°F, which the RHS equates to USDA zones 9b/10a, so it lives through the winter outdoors only in mild gardens and is grown from seed as a warm-season annual below zone 9b.

An evergreen, clump-forming shade perennial grown for its bold rounded heads of funnel-shaped orange (or yellow) flowers held on stout stalks above arching, strap-shaped, dark-green leaves in late winter and spring. Known respectfully as the Natal lily, bush lily, or simply clivia, it is one of the finest plants for dry shade in frost-free gardens and a classic houseplant everywhere else. Native to South Africa - the Cape provinces, KwaZulu-Natal, and Eswatini (POWO, Kew) - it is frost-tender (hardy roughly in USDA zones 9b-11) and is grown in a container or as a houseplant wherever winters dip below freezing. Two things are load-bearing: grown indoors it needs a cool, dry winter rest of about six to eight weeks kept cool and barely watered to set flower buds, then warmth and water to bloom; and every part is toxic (lycorine and related alkaloids) to people and pets if eaten, with sap that can irritate skin. It resents disturbance and flowers best when slightly pot-bound, so it is happiest left alone in the same pot for years.

New Zealand Christmas tree, known in New Zealand by its Māori name pōhutukawa, is a spreading coastal evergreen tree endemic to New Zealand, where its natural range is the coastal North Island and it is renowned as a cliff-dweller able to keep a hold in precarious, near-vertical places. The Christmas name comes from its bloom: from November to January, peaking in mid to late December, the tree is covered in brilliant crimson (occasionally orange, yellow, or white) flowers, each a mass of stamens. Trees reach 23 to 82 feet tall with a spreading, dome-like crown 26 to 49 feet or more across, usually on several trunks, and older trunks and branches are sometimes festooned with matted, fibrous aerial roots - a signature trait rather than a defect. It is very resistant to salt-laden maritime exposure and can be grown as a hedge in exposed seaside positions, but it is genuinely frost-tender: frost has killed it even in a sheltered Cornish garden, so it belongs only in a mild, near-frost-free coastal climate. Honesty matters here too: in parts of South Africa it grows so well that it is regarded as an invasive species, it is naturalising on coastal cliffs near Sydney in south-eastern Australia, and in San Francisco its roots are blamed for destroying sewer lines and sidewalks, so check local invasive-species guidance before planting it outside New Zealand.

A vigorous, evergreen, tendril-climbing vine from the subtropics of southern Brazil, Paraguay, and northern Argentina, grown both for its strikingly intricate purple-and-white flowers and for its edible passion fruit. The flower is a small work of engineering: a ring of white-and-purple petals beneath a fringed corona of wavy purple-banded filaments, with the five anthers and three stigmas held on a raised central column at exactly the height a large carpenter bee brushes as it forages. Where winters are frost-free (USDA zones 9b-11b) it is a fast, hard-climbing perennial that can blanket a sturdy trellis or fence in a single season and produces round, leathery purple or yellow fruits whose aromatic, seedy pulp is the fragrant passion fruit of juices and desserts. Two honest cautions matter: it is a frost-tender plant grown as an annual or under glass where colder, and the unripe fruit and the foliage contain cyanogenic compounds and are mildly toxic, so only fully ripe fruit should be eaten.

Queen palm is a tall, fast-growing feather palm native to much of central, eastern and southern Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and northeastern Argentina, and a popular ornamental planted in warm-climate gardens and streets around the world. Gardeners may know it by older names: it was formerly Arecastrum romanzoffianum, and for decades the nursery trade sold it as Cocos plumosa. A single smooth gray trunk, sometimes bulging along its length, carries a soft, drooping crown of long, glossy green, arching feather leaves made up of hundreds of narrow leaflets. Large sprays of cream to pale yellow flowers open in spring and summer and ripen into heavy hanging clusters of bright orange fruit about 0.7 to 1 inch long. UF/IFAS calls it one of the hardiest of the tropical-looking palms, but that still means USDA zone 9b (lows above about 25°F); anywhere colder it is a container or conservatory palm. It also escapes gardens: the Florida Invasive Species Council (formerly the Florida Exotic Pest Plant Council) lists it as a Category II invasive plant in central and south Florida, where the Florida Natural Areas Inventory reports it volunteering readily in natural areas, UF/IFAS advises using it with caution and keeping it out of natural areas, and Wikipedia records it naturalized in Queensland, Honduras and Mauritius as well.