Goals: Biodiversity

A scrambling roadside shrub with palmate leaves and small blue flower spikes.

A tall hill-forest tree with pinnate leaves and scented pink-tinged timber.

The plane tree of Kashmir, planted for four centuries and unmistakable in autumn.

Long soft needles in fives; the pine of the mid-Himalayan slopes.

The resin pine of the lower Himalaya, and the needle litter that makes those fires.

A small southern shrub with white flowers, long used for skin preparations.

A creeping mat for the wet edge of a terrace pond or a bowl garden.

A floating fern that fixes nitrogen — fertiliser and fodder that grows itself.

Bare branches and orange claws of flower in February — the tree that announces Holi.

Fat red flowers on a bare grey trunk, then pods of cotton that blow down every street.