Goals: Biodiversity

One enlarged white sepal per flower, so the whole shrub reads as pale bracts.

Blue flower sprays and orange berries at once; the standard clipped Indian hedge.

A thorny yellow-wooded Himalayan shrub with blue berries and traditional root use.

Pink blossom in November, out of season by every other measure — the hill wild cherry.

A Himalayan cherry with long fruit racemes that thrushes and bulbuls strip in weeks.

The wild amla of the southern hills, smaller-fruited and tougher than the orchard kind.

The sap palm of Bengal and the Deccan, tapped in winter for nolen gur.

The banj oak that holds the water in a Himalayan hillside; slow, dense and vital.

A woody climber with fringed white-and-yellow flowers and a heavy sweet scent.

A nitrogen-fixing pioneer of Himalayan landslides and north-eastern jhum fallows.