Alpinia formosana

 

This plant was sold to me as Alpinia formosana and I have no reason to doubt that. The usual common name is "pinstripe ginger" because it has very smart thin pale stripes on the leaves. It is a member of the same plant family as ginger, the Zingiberaceae. It is in the same genus as the galangal, another spicy root used in a lot of east Asian cooking. This species does not appear to be used in cooking, though it does have slightly smelly tubers that, like ginger and galangal, run parallel to the surface of the soil. The leaves smell very nice if crushed, a woody, resiny fragrance that is not quite like any others I have smelt.

Background

I decided to update the picture in the background to take out the discontinuity between the repeated tiles. So I took a new photo of a pinstripe ginger leaf (Alpinia formosana). I don't seem to have saved the cropped version of the original photo. It would have looked more or less like this:

I then flipped the image horizontally, vertically and both horizontally and vertically. Putting those four images together makes a tile that should tesselate perfectly.

Here is a mosaic approximately the shape of my screen: