Garden

A fruit is how a flowering plant packs up its seeds. Here are the garden’s fruit trees and shrubs, from sweet to sour and from familiar to unusual.

None of these plants are native to Nepal. Most came from the Americas after ships began crossing the oceans about 500 years ago, and today papaya, pineapple, chilies, and pumpkins are everyday food here.

Oranges and their relatives belong to the citrus family. Hold a leaf of any plant here up to the sun and you’ll see tiny dots of light: oil glands, which is why the leaves smell when you crush them.

Spices come from the parts of a plant that aren’t leaves: seeds, fruits, flower buds, bark, and roots. Each gets its flavor from strong-smelling oils the plant makes to protect itself.

Herbs are the leaves we cook with; the vegetables here give us leaves, stems, and roots. Many herbs taste strong for a reason: the oils in their leaves help protect them from insects and grazing animals.

Plants people in Nepal and South Asia have used for generations in traditional medicine and daily life. They’re part of our heritage, but traditional uses are no substitute for a doctor’s advice.

Beautiful, and poisonous. Many plants defend themselves with chemicals that make animals, and people, sick. Enjoy these with your eyes: never taste a plant you don’t know.

Bees, butterflies, moths, and even tiny wasps: each flower here is shaped, colored, or timed for the animals that carry its pollen.

Many red, orange, and tube-shaped flowers are made for birds, not bees: birds see red well, and a long beak fits a long tube. In Nepal the visitors are sunbirds; in the Americas, hummingbirds.

A plant can’t walk, so it sends its seeds traveling: with a spring-loaded pod, a wing that spins in the wind, a fruit that floats, or a snack for an ant.

Plants can’t walk, but they can move: leaves that fold at a touch or at nightfall, and flowers that open at a set hour or after rain.

Many plants can make copies of themselves without seeds: from a fallen leaf, a runner, a piece of stem, or an underground rhizome. Gardeners use the same tricks to grow new plants.

Climbing plants reach the light without building a thick trunk. They get there by twining their stems, grabbing with tendrils, or gripping with small roots along the stem.

Creepers spread along the ground instead of climbing up. Their stems often root wherever they touch the soil, so one plant slowly becomes a carpet.

Epiphytes grow on trees and rocks instead of in soil. They use their host only for support, not food, catching water and nutrients from rain, mist, and dust. (Plants that steal food from their host are called parasites.)

Aquatic plants live in water; amphibious plants grow happily both in water and on wet ground. Air spaces inside their stems and leaves help them float and breathe.

A leaf’s job is to catch sunlight, but leaves do it in many colors, patterns, and shapes: red and purple pigments, gold and cream patches, painted spots, and leaves split into dozens of leaflets.

A leaf can be a single blade, cut into deep lobes, or split into many separate leaflets. Leaf shape is often a botanist’s first clue to what a plant is.

Variegated leaves have patches with little or no chlorophyll, which show as white, cream, or yellow. Most variegated plants began as rare mutations that gardeners kept; since the pale parts make little food, these plants often grow more slowly.

A tree’s canopy is the shape its branches and leaves make together. Look up at these: tiers, weeping curtains, and umbrellas of leaves.

The bright “petals” on these plants aren’t petals at all. They’re bracts or sepals, colored leaves that act as signboards for pollinators, while the real flowers are small and easy to miss.

Common names can mislead. None of these plants is quite what its name says, which is why scientists give every plant a Latin name that means the same thing everywhere.

Flowers use scent to call their pollinators. Many of the strongest open at dusk for night-flying moths, which is why a garden can smell sweetest after dark.

Rub a leaf gently and smell your fingers. These plants store scented oils in tiny glands in their leaves, which help keep insects and grazing animals away.

These plants grew in Nepal’s forests and hills long before anyone planted them in a garden. Many are woven into daily life, festivals, and worship.

Bonsai is the art of growing a tree in a small pot and shaping it by careful pruning and wiring, so it looks like an old tree in miniature. The plants are ordinary species, just kept small.

The oldest kinds of land plants in the garden. Mosses and ferns never flower or make seeds: they spread by spores, dust-fine specks carried by the wind.

Cycads, ginkgo, and conifers make seeds but never flowers, and their seeds sit bare, not wrapped in a fruit. Their families were already old when dinosaurs lived.

Water lilies and magnolias belong to some of the oldest branches of the flowering-plant family tree. Their big, simple flowers have many petals and stamens, and many are pollinated by beetles, which were visiting flowers long before bees were common.

Grasses, palms, lilies, and irises are monocots: their seeds sprout with a single leaf, their leaves usually have parallel veins, and their flower parts often come in threes.

Palms are monocots that grow as trees. A palm trunk has no growth rings and doesn’t get thicker each year; it grows only from a single bud at the top, and if that bud dies, the palm dies.

Nearly all cacti come from the Americas. What makes a plant a cactus is not its spines but areoles, the fuzzy cushions the spines grow from. Some cacti live in deserts, and others hang from trees in rainforests.

Succulents store water in thick leaves, stems, or roots to survive dry spells. Cacti are succulents too, but most succulents are not cacti: the true cacti have a theme of their own.

Every plant here is a Euphorbia, yet one looks like a cactus, another like a leafy shrub, and one is the poinsettia. Botanists group plants by their flowers and seeds, not their looks: all of them share the same tiny, unusual flower structure and milky sap.