Regions: West India

The scented heartwood tree of the southern Deccan — a hemiparasite that needs a host.

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

The sap palm of Bengal and the Deccan, tapped in winter for nolen gur.

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

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

A scrambling roadside shrub with palmate leaves and small blue flower spikes.

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.