Rudbeckia nitida is a tall, luminous coneflower that trades the coarse hairiness of the common black-eyed Susans for smooth, glossy, dark green leaves and hairless stems, the shining foliage that gives the species a name. From a leafy base rise slender stems three to five feet tall, each carrying a large yellow daisy whose soft rays droop back from a raised, greenish-brown central cone, blooming through the heat of mid to late summer.
Ruellia caroliniensis, the Carolina wild petunia, is a modest, long-blooming native that carries far more ecological weight than the quiet flowers suggest. From early summer into fall, a steady succession of lavender to violet-purple trumpets, each an inch or two across and lasting only a single day, opens along upright stems a foot or two high, replaced faithfully the next morning so that the plant is seldom out of bloom for months on end.
Ruscus aculeatus, Butcher's Broom, is a low evergreen shrub of the asparagus family, native to the woodlands of southern Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East, and reaching north into the milder parts of the British Isles. What look like glossy, spine-tipped leaves are not leaves at all but flattened stems called cladodes, which take over the work of photosynthesis while the true leaves are reduced to tiny scales. The generic name comes from the Latin ruscum, the old word for a butcher's broom, and the epithet aculeatus means prickled, for the sharp point that tips each cladode.
