A terrestrial bromeliad grown for its sweet, golden, edible fruit — the abacaxi of warm Brazil. POWO records it as South American in origin, its precise wild range obscured by ancient domestication, and Flora e Funga do Brasil documents Ananas in Brazil. The plant forms a low rosette of stiff, sword-shaped leaves, many forms armed with sharply toothed margins, from the centre of which a single stout stem rises bearing a dense cone of small purple flowers. Those flowers fuse together into the familiar multiple fruit (a syncarp), topped by a leafy crown that can itself be rooted to grow another plant. HONESTY: this is a frost-tender tropical, hardy in the ground only in roughly USDA zones 10a-11b, and it is slow — a plant takes well over a year from planting to a ripe fruit. Commercial clones are largely self-incompatible and, kept isolated from other clones, set the seedless fruit prized in the kitchen.

A fast-growing, short-lived tropical fruit plant of tropical-American origin — POWO (Kew) records a neotropical origin around southern Mexico and Central America, and it is now grown throughout warm Brazil as the mamao, its presence recorded in Flora e Funga do Brasil. Although it looks like a small palm-like tree, it is really a giant single-stemmed herb: a soft, hollow, unbranched trunk topped by a crown of large, deeply-lobed, long-stalked leaves, with clusters of melon-like fruit borne directly against the trunk. It is one of the fastest food plants you can grow, often fruiting within a year of sowing, but it is short-lived and frost-tender (hardy in the ground only in roughly USDA zones 10a-11b). HONESTY: it is usually DIOECIOUS — most plants are either male or female — so you generally need a female plus a male (or one of the hermaphrodite forms) for the female to set fruit. The ripe fruit is edible and excellent fresh, but the unripe fruit and all the green parts ooze a white latex (papain) that can irritate skin and should not be eaten raw.

Cacao is the chocolate tree — a small evergreen understory tree of the lowland tropical rainforest, famous for being cauliflorous: its tiny pink-and-white flowers, and then the large ridged football-shaped pods, are borne directly on the trunk and oldest branches rather than out among the leaves. Reaching roughly 15-25 feet, it carries glossy oblong leaves that flush bronze when young. Each pod holds 30-40 seeds embedded in sweet white pulp; those seeds become chocolate only after fermenting, drying, and roasting (the cacau of Brazil). It is genuinely demanding — a true tropical, needing deep humid warmth and overhead shade and failing below about 50F — so outside the wet tropics it is a greenhouse or conservatory plant only. Its flowers are pollinated not by bees but by tiny midges.

A fast, easy, productive evergreen large shrub or small tree from tropical America, grown across warm Brazil as the goiaba. It carries smooth, mottled, peeling bark, prominently veined leaves, and white flowers followed by the fragrant, vitamin-C-rich edible fruit. In frost-free climates (roughly USDA zones 9b-11b) it begins bearing within a few years and crops heavily and reliably, which is exactly why it has become a serious invasive weed in many tropical regions outside its native range. It is frost-tender and grown in the ground only where winters stay mild; bees do the pollinating.

A fast-growing tropical woody shrub grown for its swollen, starchy storage roots — cassava, the mandioca of Brazil and one of the great staple foods of the tropical world. POWO (Kew) and Flora e Funga do Brasil record Manihot esculenta as native to and first domesticated in Brazil and the southern Amazon, the homeland of mandioca, manioc and tapioca. It forms a slender, upright shrub of palmately-lobed leaves on often red-tinged, jointed stems, and below ground it swells a cluster of long tuberous roots that are harvested, peeled and cooked. HONESTY (load-bearing): cassava is one of the most important food crops of the tropics, but the raw roots AND leaves contain cyanogenic glycosides (linamarin) and are TOXIC if eaten raw or under-processed — they must be peeled and properly cooked, and bitter varieties soaked and/or fermented, to drive off the cyanide before they are safe to eat. It is frost-tender (roughly USDA zone 9b and up) and drought-tolerant once established, which is exactly why it is such a dependable famine-insurance crop across the warm tropics.

A tropical rhizomatous herbaceous perennial in the ginger family, grown the world over for the thick branched rhizomes that — boiled, dried, and ground — become the bright yellow-orange spice. The foliage clump rises 3-4 feet in canna-like, pleated, lanceolate-to-elliptic green leaves up to 40 inches long, topped in summer by short dense spikes of pale yellow flowers among pinkish bracts. The flowers are sterile, so the plant is propagated entirely from rhizome division.