Great Lakes Basin desert steppe

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 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.

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 + 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 rough, sprawling Mediterranean annual grown for showy, open racemes of drooping, star-shaped bright blue flowers in summer. Branched stems and wrinkled, dull gray-green leaves are clad in bristly hairs and carry the taste and fragrance of cucumber. Easy in poor, dry soils, drought-tolerant, a magnet for bees, and a self-seeder that returns to the garden year after year.

An Old World cottage-garden annual grown for daisy- to chrysanthemum-like flowerheads (3 to 4 inches across) in bright yellow through deep orange, often with a contrasting darker center disk. In cool climates it blooms over a long summer-to-fall window; in hot summers it tends to languish and may need a midseason cutback to rebloom. The somewhat bitter flowers and lance-shaped aromatic leaves are edible, and the petals lend color to soups, rice, and baked goods.

A warm-season annual vine in the cucumber family grown for its sweet, aromatic netted melons - one of the six broadly accepted edible groups of the polymorphic Cucumis melo. Stiff-haired, rough-textured trailing stems climb 6 to 9 feet with the help of unbranched tendrils, carrying funnel-shaped yellow flowers that draw bees. Native to the Old World (Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, India, New Guinea, and Australia) and intolerant of frost, it is grown as an annual on the ground or on cages and trellises.

A suckering, thicket-forming native cherry that reads as a large shrub or small tree across most of North America. Fragrant white flowers open in elongated drooping racemes in spring, followed by dense pendulous clusters of pea-sized cherries that ripen red to dark purple-black in late summer. The astringent fruit is technically edible after processing, and the plant is a workhorse for wildlife - feeding birds and mammals and hosting sphinx-moth larvae.

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.

A cool-weather leafy cabbage relative grown for its broad, leathery, blue-green leaves that grow in a loose upright rosette on a thick stem - never forming a head ("acephala" is Greek for headless). A biennial almost always grown as an annual, it sweetens after a fall frost and, in mild-winter regions, keeps producing leaves through winter until it bolts in spring. One of the most cold-tolerant vegetables in the cabbage family.

Colorado blue spruce (Picea pungens) is a narrow, stiffly pyramidal conifer from the central and southern Rocky Mountains, and the source of nearly every silver-blue evergreen in cultivation. The colour is real and is the reason it is planted: the needles carry a waxy bloom that reads anywhere from grey-green to an almost metallic pale blue, sharpest on selected cultivars. In its native range, between roughly 6,000 and 11,000 feet from Wyoming and Idaho south to Arizona and New Mexico, it is a cool-climate mountain tree of moist stream sides and canyon bottoms. Planted far outside that range - which is where most people meet it - it is one of the most reliably disappointing conifers in the eastern United States, where humid summers bring on needle cast and cytospora canker and a fifteen-year-old specimen often loses its lower branches and never recovers them. It is also planted far too small: the nursery pyramid becomes a 30-to-60-foot tree. Given cool air, full sun, room, and honest expectations, it is superb and long-lived.

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.

A native North American deciduous shrub with exfoliating bark (hence "ninebark"), white-to-pink spring flower clusters, papery red seedpods, and reliable fall color. Colored-foliage cultivars (Diabolo, Coppertina, Summer Wine) extend the design palette. Adaptable + drought-tolerant once established.

An old garden-favorite annual native to Mexico, grown for showy daisy-like flowers in nearly every color but true blue - red, yellow, orange, pink, rose, lavender, green, and white. Bushy, leafy plants rise on upright, hairy, branching stems and bloom continuously from early summer to frost. A magnet for butterflies and hummingbirds, and one of the most reliable cut-and-come-again cutting-garden flowers.

A fast, low-maintenance warm-weather annual from Mexico and the southern United States, grown for saucer-shaped, daisy-like flowers (2 to 4 inches across) with red, pink or white rays around a yellow center. The lacy, threadlike bipinnate foliage gives an airy texture, and the long bloom run from early summer to frost makes it a workhorse for cutting and cottage gardens. It flowers best in lean soil - overly rich, fertile ground produces leafy plants with fewer blooms.

A fast annual culinary herb grown for both its aromatic, feathery blue-green foliage and its pungent seeds. Stiff hollow stems rise 3 to 5 feet and carry large, flattened compound umbels of tiny yellow flowers in late summer. Native to Asia Minor and the Mediterranean, dill has naturalized across parts of North America. The showy umbels draw bees, wasps, lacewings, hover flies, and other beneficial insects, and the lacy foliage is a classic larval host for the black swallowtail butterfly.

A tough, aromatic native conifer of eastern North America - actually a juniper, not a true cedar - with scale-like evergreen foliage and a broadly conical to columnar form. Missouri Botanical Garden calls it the most drought-resistant conifer native to the eastern U.S., thriving on limestone glades, fence rows, and abandoned fields. It is dioecious: female trees carry the powdery blue, berry-like cones that gave the cedar waxwing its name and feed many birds and small mammals through winter.

Field bindweed is a low, twining, deep-rooted perennial vine in the morning-glory family, with arrowhead-shaped leaves and pretty funnel-shaped flowers that open white to soft pink. Do not be charmed: Plotwright lists it as a know-your-enemy entry, not a plant to grow. Convolvulus arvensis is one of the most difficult-to-eradicate weeds in the world. A single plant builds a perennial root and rhizome system that can reach more than 20 feet deep, regenerates from the smallest broken fragment, and seeds into a soil seed bank that stays viable for decades. It twines over and strangles crops, perennials, and shrubs, climbing anything it touches. It is listed as a noxious weed in many US states. Learn to recognize it, never plant it, and treat any patch as a long-term control problem. Its one honest virtue is that the flowers are an early and season-long nectar source for some bees.

A compact, fast warm-season annual from Mexico and Guatemala (despite the "French" name) grown as bedding, edging, and container color. It typically reaches 6 to 12 inches tall with single to fully double, 1-2 inch fragrant flowerheads in yellow, orange, red, and bicolor over aromatic, deeply pinnate toothed foliage. Blooms June to frost in full sun, is low-maintenance, and is one of the few annuals deer tend to leave alone.

An aromatic annual herb of the daisy family (Asteraceae), grown for its small daisy-like flowers - 10-20 petal-like white rays surrounding a showy, bright-yellow domed center disk - borne June to August over finely divided, feathery, double-pinnate foliage. Native to Europe and western Asia, it reaches 12 to 24 inches tall and is most often grown in herb gardens to harvest its fragrant flowers, which are the chamomile used in most commercial chamomile tea because the species is sweeter and less bitter than Roman chamomile (Missouri Botanical Garden PlantFinder, which lists it under the synonym Matricaria recutita).

The towering cottage-garden classic - rigid flower spires rise 5 to 8 feet, clothed top to bottom in showy funnel-shaped blooms of white, pink, and red from June to August. A short-lived perennial usually grown as a biennial or self-seeding "annual," it reads as architecture against a wall or fence and draws hummingbirds and butterflies. Of garden origin, not native to North America, and notoriously prone to rust, which is its defining maintenance demand.

Jack pine (Pinus banksiana) is a scrubby northern pine that grows further north in Canada than any other native pine, and Missouri Botanical Garden uses the word scrubby without apology. It is 35 to 50 feet at best, often much less and often crooked, with short stiff olive-green needles barely an inch and a half long in bundles of two and strongly curved cones to two and a half inches. It is not a handsome specimen tree and should not be sold as one. What it is instead is a species that will hold ground almost nothing else will: dry sterile sand, burned-over barrens, thin acid soil across the boreal edge. Its cones are serotinous, sealed with resin and capable of hanging closed on the branch for a decade or more until a fire opens them and seeds the burn - so the whole tree is built around catastrophe rather than around continuity. And it carries one of the most specific wildlife dependencies in North America: the rare Kirtland's warbler breeds only in dense tracts of young jack pine under about twenty feet, almost entirely in northern Michigan.

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.

A fast, twining annual vine from tropical America grown for the azure-blue trumpets that open at dawn and fade by afternoon, each marked with a white-to-golden-yellow star throat. Heart-shaped leaves clothe stems that climb 8 to 10 feet in a single season on any support. Showy and easy from seed, but every part - especially the seed - is poisonous if eaten, so site it away from where pets and children graze.