Green Room

Concept

A hose reel is not something anyone buys on their first day of gardening. It is what you buy once the garden has stopped being a job and become a room in the house, and you want it to look that way. That is a specific kind of person, and there are more of them in India now than there have ever been. Terrace farms, balcony jungles, bungalow lawns, nurseries, apartment associations that finally decided the common garden should look like something.

Green Room visits them. Each episode is a garden tour told by the person who built it: what they planted, what died, what they got obsessed with. It ends where every garden day ends, at the watering setup, the way a kitchen tour finishes at the stove. The reel, the hose, the spray gun and the sprinklers appear in context, doing what they are for, in gardens worth looking at.

The custom finishes belong here. Someone who has spent years on a garden will choose a carbon-fibre reel the way they would choose a good planter, and seeing one in a real garden does more for it than any product shot.

The series also gives Zephyr something it does not have yet: a look. Real gardens, real light, real people, shot to a standard the category has never had in India.

“I like gardening. It’s a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.”
— Alice Sebold