The Cardamom Hills, in the Western Ghats between Kerala and Tamil Nadu, are a Mecca for spices and have been for thousands of years. Cardamom lucked onto the name of the area but pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, allspice, vanilla, turmeric, ginger and, of course, chilli, also thrive in the spice gardens around Kumily and Thakkerday. The mountains are a magnet to life­giving rain ­ it rains almost every day ­ but the hot tropical sun shines between showers and the soil is rich, black and fecund. Altitude, sun, rain, soil and the skill and diligence of spice farmers combine to create the world‘s biggest concentration of spice growing, and my friend Karen and I visit the area to find out more about the spices we enjoy cooking with. Getting there, and it‘s a winding four­hour journey from Kottayam, in Kerala, is a visual treat and a lesson in how increasing altitude affects horticulture. Leaving the lowlands we pass sunfilled rice fields glowing green, with their attendant butterflies, dragonflies and white herons and follow the road east to rolling hills covered in rubber trees. Each tree wears a plastic collar and cup to catch rubber slowly dripping from a downward­pointing cut. As the hills get higher rubber gives way to pineapple plantations planted in mesmerising rows. Each plant has spiky pineapple protuberances in various stages of ripeness and wiry men neatly stack hundreds of golden fruit onto a truck. We follow the hills higher and pass into coffee territory where, under tall trimmed shade trees, green bushes with red coffee cherries clustered on the stems grow in rows on the hillsides. The road soon becomes potholed and horrid and our driver nurses the car, crawling up and around ridges, past the occasional steaming, overheated truck, into the highlands. Coolness is great for growing tea and thousands of hectares of plucked trimmed bushes spread over the once­rugged mountains, smoothing them under a blanket of manicured green and stretching down and squeezing the houses into their place by the road.

Women pluck the top new tea leaves, and put the pickings into sacks slung from their heads and resting on their backs. Men collect the full sacks and haul them to the road to be trucked to one of the big boxy factories that sit like bold industrial castles in the middle of velvet green tea fields, and the leaves begin the transformation from something that looks like camellia leaves to the beverage we know and love. Thinking of tea we stop at the village of Peermade for a cup of it. Chai, strong sweet and milky is frothed and thickened by the chai wallah, who pours it, arms outstretched, from pot to pot. The end product is rich, energising and spicy with clear notes of cardamom and ginger. We stroll past a greengrocer where the seller stands surrounded by a splendid variety of fruit and vegetables. Huge elephant­foot yams, long bootlace beans, okra, bunches of bananas, sheaths of sugar cane, platters of grapes, mounds of apples, clusters of carrots and pyramids of cabbage are all artfully arranged. The road doesn‘t improve so our usually irrepressible driver resigns himself to driving slowly and gives up tailgating and tooting. The main spice growing areas, around Kumily, Periyar and Thakkerday, are over the ridgeline, at a lower altitude to the tea plantations and when we rumble in to the Taj Garden Retreat at Thakkerday the sun is low and bright. A hairy mongoose strolls down the path and noses its way into the garden next to my room, a bushy tailed squirrel scurries along the veranda rail and naughty monkeys play trapeze in the trees. It rains softly during the night and by morning thousands of sparkling drips hang shimmering in the garden. With botanist and herbalist Haneefa as our guide, a we visit a six hectare spice garden, Puthenparmppil House, belonging to a smiley 73­year­old and his family, PH Kunju Mahommed and family. His father came to Thakkerday 60 years ago to capture elephants in what was then mostly forest and stayed on to grow spices. Kunju and his family are prosperous; a well­tended garden of just one hectare can grow enough spices to sustain a small family comfortably. Perfect spice growing conditions include good rain for most of the year, slightly sloping free­draining hills and defused light from the tall and carefully pruned shade trees. And most gardens are as organic as possible; different types of insects including the honeybee are needed to pollinate many spice plants so insecticide, in particular, is frowned on. Behind Kunju‘s house, pepper vines creep up tree trunks and are decorated with immature berries, like tiny green bunches of grapes, each with a peppercorn within. Pepper creepers have long shiny downward­pointing leaves and this, Haneefa explains, is because it‘s pollinated by water which drips from the flowers at the top, down the leaves and onto the flowers below.

Peppers flower when it rains most, during the monsoon, in June and July. We learn that green, black, red and white pepper all come from the same plant at different stages of the fruit‘s maturation. Vanilla vines grow up a nearby trellis and though the plants love the Keralan climate they came originally from Central America where they are pollinated by hummingbirds so, here, Kunju hand­pollinates them. Cinnamon, and the trees are tall and have dense foliage, is an import from Sri Lanka though it has grown in these hills for thousands of years. Outer layers of bark are peeled off, dried and usually finely ground before being used to flavour food. I scrunch up leaves and cinnamon fragrance lingers on my fingers. Clove trees were brought to Kerala from Zanzibar by Arab traders two thousand years ago. We see their rosy pink flowers; the fruit is months away. When it matures the fruit has the clove inside, a wee golf tee, holding the peppercorn­sized all spice, the tiny seed. The nutmeg tree down the path has ripe, fleshy peach­sized fruit. We split one and the nutmeg is snug inside the pink lacy wrap we know as mace. Kunju‘s biggest crop, and the most valuable, is cardamom. It‘s a distant cousin of ginger and takes the form of sheaves of leafy spears higher than a man‘s head. We walk through rows of cardamom on shady hillsides and watch women carefully picking the pods and trimming the bushes to be the most productive shape. Orchid­like flowers, with one dominant red and white petal, sit on stems at the base of the plant. The spindle shaped cardamom pod develops beneath the flower and holds the fragrant small back seeds inside it. Haneefa tells us honeybees pollinate cardamom and the fruit forms 45 days after pollination. It‘s not seasonal and flowers, making cardamom pods, all year. Up by the house Kunju has a drying shed where a fire is lit and the pods are dried for 36 hours, changing from lime to pastel green. The end result is a spice with a unique, rich aromatic fragrance; "a touch of eucalyptus and camphor with lemon undertones, says Haneefa.

The chef at the Taj, Biplab Das Kumar, has prepared a late lunch using many of the spices we have seen growing in the gardens. A serving­sized boneless fish, resting in onion, chilli, coriander, cloves, cardamom, ginger, garlic and tomatoes has been wrapped in a banana leaf and steamed. This is eaten with a vegetable biryani where rice is joined by a string of c‘s; cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, coriander, chilli and cashew nuts. Both are divine. Pudding is rice pasta cooked in coconut cream, with cinnamon, cardamom and jaggery ­ a palm sugar ­ as sweetener. We finish the meal with a cup of sweet, milky chai with a spicy tang of cardamom and ginger. There is cardamom in each dish; powdered in the chai, a couple of pungent pods are in the biryani and the dessert and the little black seeds flavour the fish. Too much¬ No, never. Cardamom is the queen of spices.