Growing spaces: ground

A riverbank giant with pale bark — a campus or park tree, not a pot.

Host tree of the lac insect, with brilliant red leaf flush in spring.

The fastest usable material on earth; one clump supplies poles for years.

Sacred, enormous and the most valuable bird tree in any Indian city.

The tree that becomes a grove; only for parks, campuses and village greens.

Figs in bunches straight off the trunk, feeding birds, bats and monkeys.

Flushes pink-red new leaves in spring; a broad, fast shade tree.

The timber tree of the north Indian plain, nitrogen-fixing and fast.

The tree of the Thar — Rajasthan’s state tree, feeding people and stock in drought.

Thorny, nitrogen-fixing and useful on land nobody else will plant.