Growing spaces: ground

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

The red-timbered endemic of the Andhra hills; slow, valuable and heavily poached.

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

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

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.

The pod of the khejri — the vegetable that carries the Thar through summer.

A leafless thorny desert shrub with scarlet flowers and pickling berries.

Lasoda — sticky green fruit pickled across Rajasthan and Gujarat.