Seasons: Monsoon

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

The slender hill bamboo of Uttarakhand, cut for baskets and matting.

Yellow culms striped green; the ornamental clumping bamboo of Indian gardens.

The kusha grass of ritual, holding sandy soil across the northern plains.

Silver plumes across the riverbanks after the monsoon; the kans of the floodplain.

Pink or white flowers all year on a shrub that survives the worst urban roadside.

Narrow willow leaves and yellow bells; tough, fast and equally poisonous.

Orange tubular flowers, continuously, and the sunbirds that follow them.

The southern vasaka — a shade-tolerant shrub with white hooded flowers.

Flowers nearly all year in a warm city, and sunbirds find it within a week.