Travel Report - Berlin Streetscapes with Lantana and Pyracantha!

I was walking down the street on Museum Island in Berlin, Germany, when I spotted these street trees with colorful flowers blooming on a grey September day. As you can see, the trees are not installed in the ground, but rather are grown in large planter boxes. Anyway, I decided to take a closer look, so I moved in and found that the trees actually appear to be...

...Lantana camara! That's right, Lantana, which I've never grown (though I have plans to add it to the garden next spring), but which I think of as a dieback perennial in zone 6/7. I was under the impression that Lantana only grew to tree size in tropical climates. So perhaps Berlin takes these tree boxes into a greenhouse in the winter? Or can Lantana survive and grow into a street tree even in temperate settings? The mind boggles.

The streets of Berlin were also chock-a-block full of this pretty, but dangerous flowering shrub. If I'm not mistaken, this is Pyracantha coccinea, known colloquially as Firethorn for its painful sharp thorns. It's used sometimes in the States -- I've seen it at the Nashville Zoo to keep visitors out of certain aras -- but I've never seen it on a streetscape. It's undeniably attractive and presumably the berries will help feed Berlin's birds in the winter (although truth be told I didn't see many birds in the German urban landscape). And most of the pyracanthas I saw seemed to be thriving, even in challenging urban settings with lots of air pollution, so it's clearly one tough cookie. I was seriously tempted to add some to my garden, but I'll probably chicken out due to those forbidding thorns. 

Travel Report - Berlin Mystery Shrub?!

Unknown mystery shrub in a planter box on Berlin street. Can anyone ID it?

Well, they say travel broadens the mind.

But sometimes it just mystifies the mind.

At least that was the case when I came upon this landscaping shrub on the Berlin streetscape - in a prominent spot on Museum Island to be precise.

Anyone have a clue as to the identity of this mysterious (to me) shrub?

Close up on Berlin mystery shrub flower. Does this help any plant sleuths out there?

Detail of mystery shrub seedpod. Surely this must jog somebody's memory?

Update 10/28/14 - After cross-posting my "Please help with plant ID!" request to Google+, I received help from a few friends over there ( +Eric Hunt, +Tatjana Tijan and +Teresa Schoellkopf) letting me know that this is most likely Oleander -- or more scientifically, Nerium oleander, as Lynn points out in the comments below. As I wrote to Eric, I was kind of amazed that Berlin is using the shrub for street landscaping, considering its poisonous reputation, but Eric told me that in fact oleander is used heavily in California as a landscaping shrub, and Tatjana chimed in to say that it also grows in profusion around the Medtierranean. Teresa then mentioned another potential drawback with oleander, saying that her experience with the shrub in Galveston, TX leads her to believe that it has an aggressive root system capable of breaking through PVC pipe and damaging sewer lines. Yikes. Do you think folks should still be planting oleander given these drawbacks and the fact that it seems to have few ecological benefits?