Regions: East India

Half the country’s calories — and a bucket of it on a terrace teaches more than any book.

Flame-red reflexed petals on a climbing lily — the state flower of Tamil Nadu.

Pale crisp fruit that smells of rose water, on a small spreading evergreen.

The slender betel-nut palm of the wet coasts, grown in dense shaded gardens.

Small upright fruit on a woody perennial that crops for years in the hills.

A floating rosette that shades a tub and starves the algae — but a weed if it escapes.

A tiny creeping mat for the wet edge of a tub — the softest possible ground cover.

The wild ancestor of cultivated rice, still standing in eastern wetlands.

The bamboo that covers Mizoram, and whose mass flowering brings the rat floods.

Yellow culms striped green; the ornamental clumping bamboo of Indian gardens.