What We Plant, and Why

Nothing at Tropicalia is planted just because it looks nice. I know that sounds severe. It's not. The garden is also beautiful, and I'd argue the two things are connected, but every plant here has a job, and if it can't tell me what the job is, it doesn't stay.

When we started, twelve acres of old secondary forest and four years of slow clearing, our gardener Ignacio Alvaro and I made a rule. Every bed must feed us, feed something else, or hold the hillside together. Preferably two of the three.

The kitchen beds

Closest to the house, these are the working heart of things: lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, basil, lemongrass, three kinds of mint and a row of chard that no one in the kitchen asked for and everyone now loves. We grow in raised beds because the rain here is generous and the soil is shallow. Compost goes in twice a year. Food scraps from breakfast go to the hens, hen manure goes to the beds, and by now I can't tell you where the cycle begins.

We plant in small, staggered rows, a little every ten days, so there's never a glut and never a gap. The kitchen is only allowed to plan dinner around what's ready. That's the rule.

The pollinator border

Along every path we plant what bees and hummingbirds actually like: red ginger, heliconia, porterweed, lantana, a hedge of hibiscus. It's a long, blooming ribbon of colour, and it's the reason the garden hums. If you wonder why the fruit trees do so well, look at the border. Everything here works in teams.

This is also the part of the garden guests photograph the most. I find that funny, because it's the part that was designed least for them.

The forest edge

At the property's lower edge we've stopped cutting. We planted native trees between the old ones, a few each year, and left the leaf litter where it falls. In ten years it will be hard to see where the garden ends. That's the goal. Good boundaries, as far as I can tell, are the ones you can't point to.

Roots hold the slope. Fallen fruit feeds whatever lives in the shade. A strangler fig that came in uninvited now has its own railing, so guests don't climb it.

The one rule I break

There's a single bed I planted purely because I wanted it: a patch of night-blooming jasmine under the Ceiba cottage windows. It has no job at all except to make the evening smell like something. The others are very patient with me.

Why bother

You can run a lovely small hotel without growing any of its food. Plenty do. We garden because it makes our days make sense, and because a guest who eats a tomato they watched grow for a week will remember it longer than any view.

If you'd like to see the beds at their best, go at dusk, and read The Garden at Dusk on your way down the path.