Goals: Herbs & healing

Plant single cloves in October and lift whole bulbs in March.

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

The fastest useful tree there is — 3 m in a year, edible leaves and pods.

A small tree that lives happily in a deep pot and gives leaves all year.

Palmarosa — a scented grass of the central hills, distilled for its rose-like oil.

A sedge most people fight as a weed, though its tuber is an old perfume material.

A tough climber that fruits through the worst humidity of the year.

An intensely bitter Himalayan herb of mid-altitude meadows, slow and particular.

A slender twiner of scrub and hedges, with fragrant roots and small dark flowers.

The lichen of the spice box — not planted, but a reason to keep old trees standing.