Ginger

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 to 4 feet in canna-like, pleated, lanceolate-to-elliptic green leaves up to 3.3 feet 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.

A fast cool-season annual of the mustard family grown for its peppery, mustard-like salad greens - irregular, pinnately-lobed basal leaves in a low rosette, each with 4 to 10 small lateral lobes and a large terminal lobe (Missouri Botanical Garden). First cultivated by the ancient Greeks and Romans and still widely grown across Europe, it is best grown in the cooler spring and fall months rather than summer heat; leaves are harvested young and tender before they turn strong and bitter. Pale-yellow four-petalled flowers with dark brown or purple veins appear in corymbs if plants are left to bloom.

A warm-weather annual of the carrot family grown in herb gardens for two distinct crops from one plant: the lacy, strong-scented foliage harvested young as cilantro, and the aromatic dried seed harvested as coriander. The plant bolts and flowers quickly in hot weather, throwing up showy white-to-pale-lavender umbels and a marked leaf dimorphism - broad scalloped lower leaves give way to fine, thread-like upper foliage on the flowering stems. Fast and easy from a direct sowing, it is best succession-planted for a steady leaf harvest before heat triggers bolting.

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 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.

An Old World cottage-garden annual grown for daisy- to chrysanthemum-like flowerheads (3 to 4 inches across) in bright yellow through deep orange, often with a contrasting darker center disk. In cool climates it blooms over a long summer-to-fall window; in hot summers it tends to languish and may need a midseason cutback to rebloom. The somewhat bitter flowers and lance-shaped aromatic leaves are edible, and the petals lend color to soups, rice, and baked goods.