Eight acres of spice

Thomas does not so much walk the garden as graze it. Every few steps his hand goes out — to a pepper vine, a clump of cardamom, the low branch of a nutmeg tree — and comes back with something to crush between his fingers and hold up to your nose. He has been head gardener on the Mistline estate for thirty-one years, since long before it was a resort, and he still does it every morning.

The garden runs to eight acres on the estate's lower slopes, four hundred metres below the house, where it is warm enough for spice. From a distance it looks like jungle: tall shade trees, a green understorey, vines climbing everything. Up close it is one of the most carefully tended places you will ever see.

The queen and the king

Cardamom is the queen of spices here, Thomas says, and pepper is the king — though he admits the order changes depending on which one is paying better that year. Cardamom grows low, in the shade, in dense clumps like overgrown ginger; the pods come out at the base on long runners and have to be picked by hand, every few weeks, from August into winter. Pepper climbs. It is trained up the silver oaks and jackfruit trees and harvested from ladders, the green berries turning red and then black as they dry on mats in the sun.

Between them grow the rest: cinnamon, whose bark is peeled from young shoots in curls; clove trees, whose buds must be picked before they open; nutmeg, with its astonishing red lace of mace; vanilla, hand-pollinated flower by flower at dawn. Thomas knows each plant by where it stands and how old it is. Some of the pepper vines are older than he is.

From garden to kitchen

The kitchen at The Verandah is ten minutes up the hill from the nearest cardamom. Our chef walks the garden with Thomas most mornings and plans the day from what he shows her. In the monsoon that means green peppercorns, still soft, crushed into a sauce for pearl spot. In autumn it means fresh cardamom, which tastes almost nothing like the dried pods in a supermarket jar — brighter, greener, a little like eucalyptus.

Guests who walk the garden with Thomas tend to eat differently afterwards. They notice things. The pepper in the rasam is not just hot but floral; the cinnamon in the stew is sweet and woody rather than dusty. It is the same logic as a vineyard tour: once you have stood among the vines, the wine is never quite the same again.

The wall and the forest

The garden's far boundary is an old stone wall, and beyond it is shola forest. Wild elephants sometimes come right up to it at night, and Thomas has a store of stories about the ones that did not stop there. He says it with affection. The forest, he points out, is why the garden works at all: the rain, the shade, the insects, the soil built up from a thousand years of fallen leaves.

He is not planning to retire. His son works in the garden now, and his granddaughter, at seven, can already tell a clove bud from a pepper berry blindfolded. We have seen her do it.