Regions: North-East India

A woody climber with fringed white-and-yellow flowers and a heavy sweet scent.

The true ashoka — orange flower clusters on a small shade-loving tree of wet forest.

A tall hill-forest tree with pinnate leaves and scented pink-tinged timber.

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.

Fat red flowers on a bare grey trunk, then pods of cotton that blow down every street.

The ghost chilli of Nagaland — a genuine regional speciality, and ferocious.

Yongchak — long flat pods eaten across Manipur and Nagaland.

Sesame-like seeds used across the eastern Himalaya in chutney and oil.

Timur — the numbing hill pepper of the eastern Himalaya, on a thorny shrub.