Goals: beauty

Flowers open white and turn crimson over three days; scents a whole verandah.

Purple trumpet flushes twice a year, and leaves that smell of garlic when crushed.

Blue butterfly pea — a light climber that fixes nitrogen and makes blue tea.

Passion flower — intricate blooms and the host plant of tawny coster butterflies.

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.

Orange flower clusters straight off the trunk — a sacred tree, now threatened.

Flame of the forest — bare branches and orange flowers through the dry spring.

Yellow chandeliers in May, when the city most needs something to look at.

Neat glossy shrub with pinwheel white flowers; the easiest good hedge there is.