Home / Spice Garden
The Spice Garden and Nursery
The kitchen garden is the pantry
The nursery
Young plants are raised here in terracotta and shade before they go out into the beds — turmeric and ginger from rhizome, curry leaf from cutting, chilli and coriander from seed saved the year before.
Crush a curry leaf between your fingers as you pass. Almost nobody who has only met these spices dried recognises them growing.
The vegetable alley
A narrow strip beside the house, planted the way Mauritian families have always planted: intensively, in succession, nothing wasted. Pumpkin runs along the ground, beans climb whatever is upright, brèdes fill the gaps and are picked young.
This alley is the reason the tasting tastes of the place. Whatever is ready that morning is what goes into the pot.
Plants that were also the medicine cabinet
Ayapana for the stomach, citronella for fever, aloe for burns, tulsi at the doorstep. Before there was a clinic in every village, a Mauritian household kept its remedies in the yard and every grandmother knew which leaf to pick for what.
We will show you which is which, and how they were prepared — usually boiled, always trusted.
Sugarcane, and what it built
The fields at the edge of the property are the reason all of this exists. Sugar brought the ships, the indenture registers and the villages of the south, and it set the rhythm of Mauritian life for a century and a half — cutting season, mill smoke, and a whole island organised around one crop.
Walk to the edge of the cane and the geography of the south makes sense: the mountains behind, the coast ahead, the fields in between.
Continue exploring
Come and see it today
MUR 200
Museum, grinding demonstration, herbal tea and the boutique.
MUR 375
Museum, ancestral kitchen, spice garden, hand-grinding and tastings. Children MUR 200.
Thu – Tue
Last entry 17:00. Free onsite parking at the gate.
Visits begin at 09:00, 11:00, 13:00, 15:00 and 17:00, every day except Wednesday. Book to hold your place and we will be expecting you — or simply turn up and join the next one. Full detail on the visit page.