• TEA GARDENS OF CEYLON

  Filed under Featured Estates
  Apr 9

                                                           

  Milder breezes, lighter, clearer air and a rolling landscape lend the gardens of a more pleasant mein. The brightly colored sarees scattered among the greenery provide an appropriate touch of beauty. Things exist on a more human scale here, with estates sometimes as small as fifty acres. Most of them are located in the southwestern part of the island. The best gardens are, as always, found at the higher altitudes, from three thousand to eight thousand feet, on the eastern and western slopes of the high plateaus. Depending on the direction in which they face, the gardens are influenced by one of two monsoons; on the eastern slopes, the finest tea is plucked from late June to the end of August, whereas on the western slopes the best harvesting takes lace from February to March 15^th.
  It is now midday at Dimbula or Uva Highlands, Devonia or perhaps Pettiagalla. The Tamil women in sarees – or rather lungis, here – wear a long white cloth on their head to protect their shoulders from the sun. Despite their poverty, they support silver bracelets, anklets, and gold necklaces. Their graceful and fragile silhouettes, slightly stooped, blend well with tall plants left to grow like trees blend well with the tall tea plants left to grow like trees every thirty feet or so provide a little shade and mark out the plots.
  Here and there men dress all in white – turban jacket and long skirts down their ankles – supervises their plucking. And when the baskets are full they follow the pluckers to the door of the factory, where the tea is weighed. This tea factory in Ceylon a long white building occupying the end of a small valley, looks somewhat like an Alpine sanatorium mistakenly set in the tropics Although the soul of the garden resides in the hands of the pluckers, the factory represent the heat and the brain.

  
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