Sunnyside Up Spaces: The Petite Greenhouse

The best part of staying somewhere new is often the small corners you wander into without meaning to. At Sunnyside Up, one of ours sits at the end of the garden: a little greenhouse, room-sized and no more, its glass fogged softly from the inside, glowing faintly green on a misty Kodai morning.

Push open the door and the air changes at once, warm and damp and enveloping, like stepping into a bathhouse, heady with the smell of wet earth and growing things. On a cold afternoon in the hills, when the mist has come down over everything, it is one of the warmest, greenest places to stand with a cup of tea.

The corner it sits in has a long memory. Years ago this was where the family cow was kept, with a little room off to the side for a calf. Khajili, black and white, was let out each morning to roam wherever she pleased and came home on her own by evening, to the green gate, when she was ready. The wall behind it was one the grandfather built, and when the greenhouse went up we kept as much of the old stone as we could, grey now and mottled with lichen.

Against that wall the pots rise in tiers, terracotta, aged and mossed, in every shade of brown, and out of them comes every shade of green. There is lavender and rosemary, thyme and spearmint, geranium for its spiky scent, ferns tucked in between, a small orange tree carrying a handful of fruit, strawberries trailing over the rims. Much of it finds its way, in season, onto the breakfast tray, a sprig of mint in the chutney, a few berries, a tomato still warm from under the glass.

And in one corner, growing at a frankly alarming rate, is a pumpkin, three enormous leaves in as many weeks, with plans, clearly, to take over the place. Stop by in the evening and you might find Idli the duck ambling among the pots, and one of us doing the rounds with a battered grey watering can. You are welcome to linger.