In the beginning, I only wanted vegetables.
This is the confession of someone who now has lavender, roses, marigolds, lemongrass, three kinds of basil, turmeric, ginger, 6 different lime and orange trees, various medicinal plants whose names I’ve learned and half-forgotten and relearned, fruit trees in various states of establishment, and a cutting garden that produces flowers for the house from March through November.
The vegetables are still there. They’re just not the whole story anymore.
It started with Barbara.
Barbara, a woman I met in Auckland in 2016 — slightly wild, tremendously knowledgeable, the owner of a garden that looked, at first glance, like it had been left to sort itself out. On closer inspection it was one of the most intentional spaces I’d ever seen. Everything grew near something it helped. Nothing was wasted. The whole thing hummed. She introduced me to companion planting and the idea of permaculture — that a garden, if you design it right, works with nature rather than against it, that you’re meant to share with all creatures. That diversity is strength.
I came home from that trip and started paying attention differently.
Two years later I did a permaculture (PDC) course, led by Malvikaa Solanki, a woman who had built a three-acre, biodiverse, fully self-sustaining farm from scratch. I came back knowing two things: I wanted to grow food, and I wanted to grow it properly, with intention, not just stick seeds in the ground and hope.
The Goa garden was the first real attempt. I made every beginner’s mistake — hired the wrong people, spent money on unnecessary labour, let professionals misguide a newbie. But during the worst of Covid, when the markets were unreliable, that garden fed us anyway. That felt extraordinary. It still does, when I think about it. We ate what we grew.
But Goa was practice. The Nilgiris has been the real thing.
Here, I simply observed for the first eight months. Planted nothing. The estate already had peach, banana, avocado, guava, papaya and flowers. Then I got a short strip of tea bushes cleared and designed my own garden — leaf-shaped raised beds, a line of vetiver and lemongrass to hold soil where it tends to slip, a separate herb and medicinal plant section, trellises for beans and tomatoes, strips of cosmos, cornflowers, daisies, yarrow and marigolds interspersed with basil. Season by season, the garden has given bounties — bell peppers, chillies, eggplants of every variety. When my mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, I planted velvet beans — a plant-based source of dopamine. I added the flowers because the bees needed them, and because cutting a bunch of something you’ve grown yourself and putting it on your table is a quietly radical pleasure.
The garden looks, I think, like always a work in progress — much like me. Not Instagram-perfect, but genuinely alive and producing and layered in the way that good gardens are.
There’s always something to do in it. There’s always, if I stand still for a moment, something happening in it without me.
That’s the part I didn’t expect to love as much as I do. A garden doesn’t wait. It keeps going regardless. That’s either humbling or reassuring, depending on the day.
Most days it’s reassuring.
