Regions: South India

Velvet crested heads that hold colour for weeks, in sun or half shade.

The most reliable cut flower for an Indian summer terrace.

A fortnight of spectacle and then a head of seed the birds will take.

Edible flowers and leaves, and a magnet that pulls aphids off your vegetables.

Opens in full sun on a terrace where nothing else will survive noon.

Flowers every day of the year and asks for nothing. Indigenous to the deccan.

Orange flower clusters straight off the trunk — a sacred tree, now threatened.

Compact evergreen with flower heads butterflies work all morning.

Neat glossy shrub with pinwheel white flowers; the easiest good hedge there is.

Orange jessamine — flushes of scented white flowers after every rain.