Goals: Flowers & beauty

Edible flowers and leaves, and a magnet that pulls aphids off your vegetables.

Opens in full sun on a terrace where nothing else will survive noon.

Flowers every day of the year and asks for nothing. Indigenous to the deccan.

Golden champa — a tall tree whose flowers are sold by the handful at dusk.

Flowers through the hottest months on almost no water. Every part is poisonous.

Thrives on being ignored — the more you neglect it, the harder it flowers.

A Himalayan ginger relative with scented white flowers and aromatic rhizomes.

Companion-planting workhorse: keeps nematodes down and feeds bees all season.

Flowers nearly all year in a warm city, and sunbirds find it within a week.

A pot by an open window does more for a summer evening than any air freshener.