Goals: Herbs & healing

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

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

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.

A monsoon-flowering lily of the western hills, grown for its white tuber cluster.

A dry-hill root used to colour oil a deep red; slight above ground, tough below.

Near-indestructible succulent for a bright sill; water only when the soil is dry through.