Caspian lowland desert

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, 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 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.

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 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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Common juniper (Juniperus communis) has the largest natural range of any woody plant on earth. Missouri Botanical Garden calls it "the most widespread conifer growing in the world today", and the WGSRPD range mapped in this record runs to 130 botanical countries: a circumboreal band right around North America, Europe and Asia that reaches inside the Arctic Circle, plus one stranded population in the Atlas Mountains of North Africa. Its second claim is in the drinks cabinet. The waxy blue-black "berries" are fleshy seed cones rather than fruit, and they are the botanical that makes gin gin - the spirit category is legally defined by juniper being the predominant flavour, in EU spirit-drink law and in the US standards of identity alike. The honest caveat is that none of that makes it a good bet in most American gardens. MBG records "superior tolerance for cold temperatures and superior intolerance for heat and humidity" and states plainly that it is not recommended for planting south of USDA Zone 6, and it also notes that species plants are rarely sold in commerce - what a garden centre stocks is cultivars. Settle the habit question before buying, too, because the same species is a 9-to-12-inch prostrate mat on an exposed ridge, a 5-to-15-foot multi-stemmed shrub through most of the US, and occasionally a 45-foot tree.

An upright, multi-stemmed, suckering deciduous shrub in the olive family, grown for its intensely fragrant mid-to-late-spring (May) bloom of lilac-purple flowers in large conical panicles. Native to southeastern Europe and cultivated in North America since the early 1600s, it matures to 12 to 16 feet tall with blue-green, pointed-ovate to heart-shaped leaves. It needs cold winters and cool summers - and offers few ornamental features after bloom, with leggy form, no fall color, and summer powdery mildew.

A very large montane evergreen conifer of cool, moist European mountain forests, narrowly conical when young and reaching well over 100 feet (often 98 feet and more) at maturity. Its signature is the foliage: flat, blunt, comb-arranged needles that are dark glossy green above and marked beneath with two chalky silvery-white bands, giving the 'silver' fir its name. Mature trees carry upright, barrel-shaped cones high in the crown that ripen and shatter on the tree rather than falling whole. Abies alba is native to the mountains of central and southern Europe - the Pyrenees, Alps, Apennines, Carpathians and Balkans (POWO, Kew) - and it carries that origin into the garden: it wants a cool, moist, sheltered climate and deep, well-drained soil, and it struggles with summer heat, drought, atmospheric pollution and late spring frosts. It is slow to establish and then long-lived, a forest-scale specimen for large, cool gardens and uplands rather than hot or urban sites.

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 native northern + western North American deciduous shrub with brilliant red winter stems (the design-defining trait), white spring flower clusters, white-to-blue drupes, and orange-red fall foliage. Tolerates wet feet + cold winters; among the most reliable winter-interest native shrubs for cold landscapes.

A long-lived clump-forming perennial vegetable grown for its thick, tart leaf stalks (petioles), which range from deep red to pink to green and are used in sauces, jams, and pies. Bold, heart-shaped dark green leaves rise 2 to 3 feet over a wide crown, and tall whitish flower panicles appear from late spring into summer. The leaf blades are NOT edible - they carry toxic levels of oxalic acid - only the stalks are eaten.

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.

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.

Japanese holly is a dense, small-leaved evergreen shrub native to Japan, Korea, eastern China, and adjacent regions of eastern Asia, widely grown as a boxwood substitute for formal hedging and topiary. It tolerates heavy shearing well and thrives in acidic soils in a range spanning USDA zones 5b-8b. The honest catch is twofold: the glossy black berries are toxic to humans and pets (a genus-wide trait of Ilex), and the species is listed as invasive in parts of the eastern United States, where bird-dispersed seedlings colonise native woodland edges.

Scotch broom is a fast-growing, deciduous shrub native to western and central Europe - particularly abundant in Great Britain and Ireland - valued in the garden for its extravagant spring display of golden-yellow pea-flowers smothering every green stem. It tolerates poor, dry, acidic soils and thin sands where little else thrives, and fixes atmospheric nitrogen via root rhizobia, making it genuinely useful on impoverished ground. The honest catch is its behavior: all parts contain quinolizidine alkaloids (notably cytisine and sparteine) that are toxic to livestock and potentially harmful to humans, its explosive seed pods fling viable seed up to several metres, those seeds remain viable in soil for up to ten years, and in North America (Pacific Coast states) and Australasia it is a serious invasive weed listed on noxious-weed registers - so planting it in those regions is both ecologically harmful and in some jurisdictions illegal.