Regions: East India

An enormous umbrella crown of ferny leaves that folds shut before rain.

Cream powder-puff flowers, then papery pods that rattle all winter.

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.

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

A dark-stemmed shrub of the wet coasts with traditional joint-pain uses.

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

Singhara — a floating annual grown in ponds and tanks across the north and east.

Bihar’s pond crop — prickly floating leaves and the popped seed of fasting food.

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