Regions: South India

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.

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

Bare branches and orange claws of flower in February — the tree that announces Holi.

Crocodile-bark and big leathery leaves; the tasar silk tree of central India.

A large deciduous tree of the Deccan, tapped traditionally for its red kino gum.

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