Aesthetic Features

This is where most people start, and there is nothing wrong with that. You are going to look at this every day for twenty years and you should like what you see. The useful correction is not to start somewhere else — it is to understand that aesthetic traits are the most conditional thing about a plant.

Flowering is the least reliable of the four. A bloom depends on the buds surviving winter, on the plant not being pruned at the wrong time, and — here especially — on a late frost staying away after the plant has broken dormancy. Most plants flower for two or three weeks. Choosing a plant primarily for its flower is choosing it for about five percent of the year.

These are the aesthetic traits we sort by.

Flowering
Produces flowers worth planting it for. The least reliable of the aesthetic traits here — bud hardiness and late frost both apply, and most plants flower for two or three weeks.
Foliage Interest
Leaves worth looking at in their own right — color, texture or size. The most reliable aesthetic trait there is, because it works every day of the season and does not depend on a frost date.
Fragrant
Scented foliage or flowers. Real, and entirely positional — fragrance carries in still air and vanishes in wind, so a fragrant plant away from where people stand is one nobody smells.
Fruit-Bearing

Produces fruit, berries or hips as part of what it contributes to a planting. Whether that is an asset or a nuisance comes down to one question: does the fruit hold on the branch, or drop — and what is underneath it.

Ornamental
Grown for how it looks rather than for a job it does. The broadest tag in this vocabulary, and most useful as a starting point for the question of what the plant is actually for.

Foliage is the most reliable of the four, and it is the one most homeowners underweight. Leaf color, leaf texture and leaf size are there every day of the growing season, they do not depend on a frost date, and they are what actually carries a planting. A border built on foliage contrast reads well in July when nothing is in flower — which is most of the time. Experienced designers lean on this far harder than people expect them to.

Fragrance is real but positional. It carries in still air and disappears in wind, and there is a great deal of wind here. A fragrant plant forty feet from where anybody sits is a fragrant plant nobody smells. They belong beside a door, a patio or a walk — somewhere a person passes within a few feet of it.

And fruit is an asset or a liability depending entirely on what is underneath it. The same crabapple that is a good decision in a border is a bad one over a patio, a walk or a parking area, and the difference shows up for a few weeks every fall for the life of the tree.

None of this argues against choosing plants because you like them. It argues for checking two things first: that the thing you like will still be doing it in August, and that you will be standing somewhere you can see it. If you have a picture of something you want — a yard you drove past, something from a magazine, a photo from a trip — bring it. Half the time we can get close with something better suited to this ground than whatever was in the photo, and that conversation goes much faster with an image than a description.

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