(Chinese Chives)

There are lots of reasons to love and hate garlic chives, also called Chinese chives. On the upside, they’re easy to grow, attractive and delicious to eat. The downside is they're impossibly invasive if one doesn't remove their flower heads before they set and drop seed. Each seedhead produces copious amounts of viable, black, wedge-shaped seeds that germinate fast. You’ll be weeding baby garlic chives out of every garden nook and cranny. The plants originate from Southwest China but have become...

(Wild Garlic)

This is an enormous and diverse plant genus. The onion family contains about 1250 species of herbaceous bulbous or rhizomatous plants that can be found across north temperate climates worldwide. All are perennials and cultivated forms are either grown for their ornamental flowers and foliage or as crops that yield edible greens and bulbs, such as onion, garlic, chive and leek. Species may be deciduous or evergreen and some are ephemeral.

Ornamental onions run the gamut from tiny groundcovers...

(Italian Alder)

Glossy heart-like leaves and the persistent brown seed fruits make Italian alder a great shade tree with multi-season interest and grace. An upright deciduous tree that does not get too wide, it hails from southern Italy and Corsica. Its barks becomes light gray-sandy brown with shallow fissures and small plates, often blotched.

In early spring this tree flowers. The male flowers are in drooping, finger-like clusters called catkins and are yellow-green. The female flower are small and red and...

(European Alder)

Black alder is a medium-sized, fast-growing, deciduous tree native to Europe, western Asia, and northern Africa, but has naturalized in other regions including the northeastern and central United States. It bears handsome, glossy, dark-green leaves from spring to fall, and its catkins provide mild interest in winter and early spring.

Requiring sun but thriving in most soils, it excels as a shade or screening tree in sites that are too damp or barren for other trees. It may be invasive in some...

(Cutleaf European Alder)

Black alder is a medium-sized, fast-growing, deciduous tree native to Europe, western Asia, and northern Africa, but has naturalized in other regions including the northeastern and central United States. It bears handsome, glossy, dark-green leaves from spring to fall, and its catkins provide mild interest in winter and early spring.

Requiring sun but thriving in most soils, it excels as a shade or screening tree in sites that are too damp or barren for other trees. It may be invasive in some...

(European Alder)

Black alder is a medium-sized, fast-growing, deciduous tree native to Europe, western Asia, and northern Africa, but has naturalized in other regions including the northeastern and central United States. It bears handsome, glossy, dark-green leaves from spring to fall, and its catkins provide mild interest in winter and early spring.

Requiring sun but thriving in most soils, it excels as a shade or screening tree in sites that are too damp or barren for other trees. It may be invasive in some...

(Japanese Alder)

Glossy green leaves and the persistent brown seed fruits make Japanese alder a great shade tree with a broad adaptability to landscape soils and moisture. A pyrimad-shaped deciduous tree that does not get too wide, it hails from Japan, Korea and China's Manchuria. Its barks becomes light gray-sandy brown with shallow fissures.

In early spring this tree flowers. The male flowers are in drooping, finger-like clusters called catkins and are yellow-brown. The female flower are small and purplish...

(White Alder)

White alder is a large, fast growing, short-lived, deciduous tree native to the western United States. It bears glossy, nearly diamond-shaped, dark green leaves from spring to fall. Its catkins provide mild interest from winter and early spring. White alder grows best in sites with full sun but also excels as a shade tree. It thrives in most soils and grows will in sites that are too damp or barren for many other trees.

(Oregon Alder, Red Alder)

Glossy dark green leaves with red veins, platy gray bark and the persistent brown seed fruits make red alder a great shade tree with beauty and landscape adaptability, including salty soil. Native to extreme western Canada southward into Oregon and California in the United States, it's a vigorous, cone-chaped deciduous tree. Its bark becomes ghostly gray-sandy brown that cracks into flat plates. The inner bark will turn red when exposed to air.

In early spring this tree flowers before leaves...

(Hardy Elephant Ear, Went's Taro)

This is much hardier that your average elephant ear. Went's taro can tolerate winters to zone 7, especially if planted in a protected location. This clump-forming herbaceous plant originates from the montane regions of New Guinea. If offers bold deep green leaves with purple or bronze-hued undersides. In summer it produces fairly inconspicuous flowers that consist of an ivory floral column, called a spadix, that's wrapped by a green petal-like leaf, called a spathe.

Sites with partial sun to partial...