Goals: Grow food

Central India’s most important livelihood tree — flowers, oil and shade.

The fastest usable material on earth; one clump supplies poles for years.

Purple fruit in June and dense evergreen shade for the rest of the year.

Kagzi lime — the single most useful pot tree for an Indian household.

The fruit of the dry west, cropping where irrigation is impossible.

Mosambi — a grafted tree in a big tub crops well in the west and centre.

A century-tree with feathery shade and the sourness of half of Indian cooking.

Feathery-leaved and drought-hardy; one grafted tree feeds a household in winter.

A thorny hedge shrub that gives pickling fruit and keeps animals out.

Small sour-sweet berries in May, from a shrub that shrugs off a Delhi summer.