A favorite of many gardeners: very small with a compact, rounded habit, two-tone flowers, and a long blooming season! Strongly fragrant and repeat flowering, English Lavender 'Thumbelina Leigh' features profuse violet-blue, plump flower spikes that bloom continuously from late spring to mid-summer. Its compact growth habit and short spikes make it a beautiful candidate for containers. Blooms once in early summer. May experience a second and third flush of flowers during the season if the flowers are cut soon enough.

Admired for the beauty of its foliage, bright blooms and spicy fragrance, Helichrysum italicum (Curry Plant) is a small bushy evergreen shrub featuring a particularly attractive, fine, linear, silvery foliage with curry-scented leaves. When placed along a walkway, the fragrance can be enticing. In midsummer, domed clusters of small, lemon yellow flowers are produced that are useful in dried flower arrangements since they retain their color.

Tall and free-flowering, Kniphofia 'Tawny King' features bronzed stems bearing attractive terminal spikes of tubular, cream flowers gradually opening from apricot buds. Native to South Africa, this eye-catching plant provides weeks of color from mid-summer to early fall. Changing color as the flower matures, this robust perennial displays the deepest shades in bud and fades as the flower opens, resulting in a bicolor look. Virtually disease free, this favorite of hummingbirds is also drought, deer, and rabbit tolerant.

Statuesque with tufts of foliage bursting with emerging seed heads in early summer, Stipa gigantea is an impressive ornamental grass. Evergreen or semi-evergreen, it forms a dense mound of slender, arching gray-green leaves, up to 18 in. tall (45 cm), from which emerge erect flower spikes rising 4 ft. (120 cm) above the foliage. They bear elegant panicles of silvery spikelets, with long awns and dangling golden anthers which sway gracefully in the slightest breeze and persist well into winter. Spectacular when backlit by the rising or setting sun!

Particularly suitable for coastal gardens, Olearia x scilloniensis (Daisy Bush) is a compact, rounded evergreen shrub with small, wavy-edged, gray-green leaves. In late spring or early summer, every shoot becomes so smothered with clusters of white, daisy-like flowers with yellow centers, that the leaf almost disappears. Fast-growing, this flowering shrub is wind-hardy, does not mind salt-laden air or atmospheric pollution, and requires very little attention.