Lonicera nitida.

The second plant looks like Physalis. To me the first looks like a juniper, Juniperus. Some junipers have a lot of juvenile foliage which is very prickly. I would ( with gloves) clean out the brown area. Some conifers shed more brown foliage than others. Another consideration is that black pots heat up a great deal in sun. I have no clue as to your last plant. Here is a link that might be useful: Physalis

Most of the remaining leaves are in the 2.5 to 3.5 cm range. Because the largest leaves in the original photo were devoured, I'm guessing the longest was around 4.0 cm. In Texas parlance, that's "smaller than a live oak's, but bigger than a yaupon's". For reference, the fence boards are about 3 3/8 inches wide. Don't recall seeing lonicera nitida around here, though our hardiness zone is okay. Must be other reasons there's little or no mention on area university or nursery web sites. Appears more common in the US Pacific Northwest. EDIT: Added link to a fact sheet which gives leaf length for Chinese privet in the range of 2 to 5 cm. Here is a link that might be useful: Ligustrum sinense fact sheet This post was edited by bostedo on Wed, Oct 23, 13 at 21:59

Oh dear god, it's a terror of landscaping plastic underneath. I have found at least 4 layers, most is plastic, though some is the fabric. *blech* I dig out what I can, but it's just not feasible to rip everything out. I understand the mulch is meant to decay, but from what we can tell, this family has just been putting mulch upon mulch upon (plastic) upon mulch for the better part of 30 years, so it had spilled into neighbors yards, and outside the boundaries it should have been confined to. We pulled about an inch or two maybe out, until we hit the first layer of plastic. We don't use electric trimmers, but we use like... manual hedge clippers, and trust me, there are plenty of extraneous clippings and twigs to be raked by the time we get around to all of them. The electric trimmers are what causes the inside of the bush to be all plain twigs with no growth? I see that in a lot of our shrubs - I have to be very delicate with some of them. I found this article, it describes my house to a t. The shrubs are like the landscaping at a bad corporate office, but I'd at least like to keep them healthy, and not have them take over/run into each other until I figure out what I want. I guess I'd been keeping them to the same shapes they were in when we moved in. Any idea if I called around to nurseries in the spring that maybe they'd want some of these? Euf. Here is a link that might be useful: Shear madness