Regions: North-East India

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

The deep red night-flowering lily of eastern tanks and temple ponds.

Grows on water or wet mud and crops every fortnight through the monsoon.

One enlarged white sepal per flower, so the whole shrub reads as pale bracts.

A nitrogen-fixing pioneer of Himalayan landslides and north-eastern jhum fallows.

The forest ancestor of the orchard mango, still fruiting in eastern hill forest.

Glossy drooping new leaves in pink, then white flowers with a gold centre.

Orange-yellow flowers whose scent carries across a whole garden at dusk.

Pink blossom in November, out of season by every other measure — the hill wild cherry.

The tejpatta of the sub-Himalayan tract — three-veined leaves, straight off the tree.