Pineapple

A warm-season member of the nightshade family (Solanaceae) - a relative of tomato, potato, and pepper - grown for its showy, glossy edible berries that range from white and green through deep purple to nearly black depending on cultivar. The plant is technically a tender herbaceous perennial but is grown as an annual vegetable across most of North America, where it demands a long, hot, frost-free season to fruit well. Drooping violet star-shaped flowers give way to the familiar pendant fruit; the leaves, flowers, stems, and roots are toxic and only the fruit is eaten.

A bold, upright warm-season annual from the Andes, grown in gardens for its long, rope-like tassels of tiny blood-red flowers that hang straight down from the stem tips and leaf axils from July until frost. The same species is kiwicha, an Andean grain and leaf crop cultivated for thousands of years, including by the Incas, and it is also called Inca wheat. Garden plants usually reach 3 to 5 feet, with drooping tassels typically to 12 inches long and occasionally to 24 inches; selections with yellow-green tassels exist, and grain types carry heads in white, red or black. The tiny seeds are eaten cooked, popped or ground into flour, and the leaves are eaten like spinach, but grow it without chemical fertilizers if you plan to eat it, because the leaves concentrate nitrates on nitrogen-rich soil. It is frost-tender and grown for a single warm season in every zone.

A giant herbaceous perennial from Southeast Asia and the principal wild ancestor of most cultivated dessert bananas. What looks like a trunk is a 'pseudostem' - tightly rolled leaf sheaths - topped by a fountain of huge, paddle-shaped leaves that can run 6 to 10 feet long, giving an instant tropical effect. In frost-free climates (USDA zones 10a-11b) an established clump produces a drooping flower spike and a hanging bunch of edible fruit, then that pseudostem dies and is replaced by a sucker from the base. It is frost-tender: everywhere colder it is grown as a bold container or greenhouse foliage plant that is overwintered indoors and rarely, if ever, fruits.

Achiote, also sold as annatto or lipstick tree, is a fast-growing evergreen shrub or small tree native from Mexico through Central America to Colombia, Venezuela, the Guianas, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and northern Argentina, and planted across the tropics for its seeds. Clusters of pink or white flowers about 2 inches across, like single wild roses, open at the branch tips and are followed by clusters of red to red-brown capsules covered in soft bristles, which split open to show seeds coated in a waxy red-orange layer. That coating is annatto: the coloring and mild seasoning behind achiote paste and sazón, the yellow-orange of many cheeses, butters, and margarines, and the red body paint and lipstick that gave the plant its English name. In a garden it usually stays 6 to 12 feet tall and wide as a specimen or informal hedge, though as a tree it can reach 20 to 30 feet. It is frost-tender and needs a frost-free climate: it is hardy outdoors in USDA zones 10a-12b and grown elsewhere in a large container or conservatory that comes indoors before frost. Outside its native range it has naturalized on many Pacific islands, sparingly so in Hawaii, and in the Galapagos, where the Charles Darwin Foundation rates it potentially invasive.

Camellia sinensis is the evergreen shrub whose leaves, buds, and stems yield every style of tea - white, green, oolong, and black - and it is native to the monsoon-forest borderlands of SW China, Myanmar, northeast India, and mainland Southeast Asia. In gardens outside zones 7–9 it is too frost-tender to grow unprotected outdoors, and the honest catch is its unyielding demand for reliably moist, acid soil (pH 4.5–6.5): on anything alkaline or prone to summer drought it yellows, stalls, and refuses to thrive no matter how warm the climate.

A bold, clump-forming evergreen perennial from South Africa, grown for big rounded umbels of trumpet-shaped blue (or white) flowers held on tall bare stalks above arching, strap-shaped leaves in mid-to-late summer. It is widely sold as "lily of the Nile," but that is a misnomer - the plant is South African (the Cape provinces and KwaZulu-Natal), not from the Nile. Spectacular and easy in warm climates, this evergreen Agapanthus is frost-tender, so in cold-winter areas it is grown in a container and overwintered under cover. The RHS has given several Agapanthus praecox forms its Award of Garden Merit and rates this evergreen species half-hardy (H3 - needs winter protection).

A frost-free edible palette for humid subtropical and tropical gardens: fruiting canopy, understory crops, edible roots, and container-friendly patio plants.