The Building Of A Greenhouse

I've always loved how greenhouses look, the light caught and held in the glass, the air heady with the warm damp smell of wet earth, of green things growing. And yet I never wanted one. Glasshouses were for other people, English rectories and botanical gardens, the Victorians who built palaces of iron and glass to keep their orchids alive through winters that would have killed them. 

Plus, at the back of my mind, it always felt like a bit of a cop out. A garden outdoors is hardcore. You and your plants are out in the open, battling the heat of the summer sun, the torrential cloudbursts of the monsoon, the bitter cold of a Kodai winter. You work with what you are given and you earn whatever you grow.

A greenhouse is the opposite of all that. It keeps within a warm, still pocket of air where plants grow easily, on their own schedule. There is no struggle in it, which, to a Catholic, is always a little suspect.

So my first instinct, when the idea of  building a small, room-sized one in the compound came up, was to shrug. Okay. Whatever. And so work began in the space enclosed by a broken-down wall, overgrown with huge green and orange nasturtiums, and littered with empty Bisleri water bottles.

But it had not always been a dumping ground. When I was small, this was where my grandfather kept the cow (we always had a cow then) and a little room off to the side for a calf, when there was one. I remember Jasmina, brown, with big, beautiful eyes, and before her, Khajili, black and white, who was let out each morning to roam wherever she pleased and came back on her own by evening.

Everything here, it seems, keeps its own schedule. Khajili did, ambling home to our green gate when she was ready. The building of the greenhouse would too.

Stone Expected: 1 month | Actual: 7 months

We wanted to retain as much of the old wall as we could as my grandfather had built it. The trouble was that the only mason we could get came after his own day was done, and so my grandfather's wall was rebuilt at night, by torchlight, the crew working on past midnight while we stood in the dark barely able to see what they were doing to it. Then we went through three windows before one looked like an actual window, and a door that took longer to find than the entire wall took to build. Terracotta Expected: 2 weeks | Actual: 5 months

The pots were another matter. I just wanted plain terracotta ones, standard, simple-shaped straight-walled. Reader, they don't exist anymore. Plastic, yes, in every shape you like. Terracotta, only in strange designs. The normal clay pot, the kind that has existed since we started putting plants in pots has somehow gone extinct. A moment of silence, please.

Roots

Expected: 2 weeks | Actual: 3 months

For the plants I went searching and found two new nurseries besides Aravind, which I've frequented for years, Levinge and the Kodai Horticultural Institute. For one half of the greenhouse, I came away with lavender and rosemary, thyme and spearmint, geranium for its spiky scent. And to make the space feel more alive, I pulled different varieties of fern.  For the other half, we bought big grow bags for tomatoes and little red radishes, spinach and pumpkin.

All in, the little greenhouse took the better part of a year. In the time it took to build the thing, I could have grown, and eaten, a great many vegetables the hard way outside. 

Now that it's here, though, it has quickly become my favourite corner of the compound. (The pots are terracotta! Aravind Nursery hadn't had them when I asked. Then one day they did, and I bought every one.) Most of them are beautifully aged, mossed at the rims, in every shade of brown, they sit in tiers against my grandfather's old stone wall, grey and mottled with lichen, and out of them comes every shade of green there is: the fine feather of the ferns, the soft grey-green of geranium, spearmint and thyme, the little orange tree with its handful of fruit, strawberries trailing over the edges.

Kai and I play with mud in the pots in the morning and I take my evening tea in there, Idli ambling surreptitiously nearby, or work my way along the rows with the grey watering can, pausing each time to marvel at the pumpkin growing monstrously in the corner. In just three weeks, it’s grown the size of what would have taken me the equivalent of three months outdoors. I keep waiting to feel that it is cheating. I stand there with my tea, watching it grow, and I don't.