Beautiful flowers (which make great cut flowers), East Coast Native, evergreen foliage, tidy, and incredibly easy to propagate. It works well as an edger, naturalizer, or in front of the border. Why this plant isn't more popular is completely beyond me.

This picture shows the robust, low foliage and the cool seed heads. Both the flowers and the seed heads are great in flower arrangements. The plant also works well in containers. Did I mention that I love this plant?

Balloon flower foliage, plus lamb's ear, peony, sedum, hosta, a few mums, and an thuja and stewartia. American asters (Symphyotrichum) are well behaved plants that have healthy fine foliage all summer and explode in beautiful flowers when stores start selling those dead wreaths that signify autumn. I do not understand why more people don’t plant them, probably because of the elaborate trimming instructions that is supposedly necessary.

My pruning method: During the summer, I trim it up if it looks too sloppy, otherwise, I leave it be. These flowers were not cut back at all.

Usually these plants don’t look so fresh in August when Sedum blooms (and the late summer flowers are definitely an anomaly) but this plant looks great and grows in sun or shade.

The leaves come in pretty much any color imaginable, and they will look great all year if they are kept moist enough and the winter is mild.

You have to look for the flowers under the huge leaves, but they are a delight. The fruit is supposedly tasty, 

A fun woodland native that is low growing with huge leaves. The sprouts pop out like umbrellas and they create a relaxed ground cover. There is a wildly expensive variegated version available, but I haven’t had much success with it. If they are in moist shade, they will stick around all summer, buy mine usually go dormant by August.

A true woodland with showy flowers.

I don't like the flowers. Cutting them back hard every year yields a lovely, upright shrub with a lot of impact and a small footprint. The leaves have better color in full sun, but the purple versions still color up well in the shade.

Evergreen foliage. They are often lumped with rhodos, but they have more delicate flowers in June. 

Canadian yew is very dark green and it can be pruned to pretty much any shape. In early summer, the new growth is quite bright. There are very few needled evergreens that will grow in the shade. This plant’s reputation suffered because it was too popular a few decades ago, so now it is “old fashioned.”

These flower more in the sun. Frankly, I prefer the leaf/flower balance when they are grown in the shade with lean soil. The flower heads are great in winter, but they brown quickly and they are a little depressing in August. I usually cut them off as soon as they begin to decline so their corpses don’t detract from the showy, heat loving plants.

Perfect in every way. Don't let familiarity blind you to this plant's incredible virtues.

I grow hybrids and cultivars because the flowers are truly exceptional. The species plants have smaller flowers and they demand much more water - they look like sparsely blooming siberian iris without the robust foliage. There is a variegated form that I spent a fortune for several years ago, but there are better variegated plants and the flowers were not worth the trouble.

Easy to grow with flowers as big as your face, and it attracts hummingbirds. What’s not to love?