Secret Kandy Part 4 | Where The Grass Is Greener

City though it is, Kandy - sequestered within high mountains and deep valleys – has numerous secretive wild pockets of utter bewitchment.  But where will you find them – and what will you find when you get there?

One of Kandy’s most fantastic secrets is its nature. The city sits in a valley surrounded by five central hills, up which, like an indulgent bubble bath, buildings of later regret have begun to creep. But one side of the city remains nicely protected - UdawaththaKele Forest. Once a forest hunting reserve for the kings, it is now a magical 104-hectare protected nature reserve. It is home to 460 plant species, as well as butterflies, snakes, snails, lizards, toads, frogs, insects, monkeys, civet, deer, loris, boars, porcupines, the ruddy mongoose, giant flying squirrels, bandicoots, and bats. But its real draw is its birds. Over 80 species have been recorded here, many endemic, including Layard's parakeet, the yellow-fronted and brown-capped babblers, the Sri Lanka hanging parrot, the three-toed kingfisher, mynas, golden-fronted and blue-winged leafbirds, spotted and emerald doves, Tickell's blue flycatcher, the white-rumped shama, the crimson-fronted barbet, the serpent eagle, and brown fish owl.

Other birds – turtles, cormorants, egrets, pelicans, eagles, owls, herons – can be found swimming away on Kandy Lake. Known as the Sea of Milk, the lake is surrounded by a dramatic Cloud Wall across much of its three-kilometre circumference and is overhung by giant rain trees. In its eighteen-metre depth lurk whistling and monitor lizards, turtles, and numerous fish, including an exotic 9-foot-long alligator Gar – a fish with a crocodilian head, a broad snout, and razor-sharp teeth.

Nature tamed is another aspect of the city. “Will you come to our party today, Carrie Wynn? / The party is all ready now to begin; / And you shall be mother, and pour out the tea, / Because you’re the oldest and best of the three.”

Elizabeth Sill, a Victorian children’s writer, was the first person noted to use the phrase “being mother” when it came to pouring out the tea. Its echo is heard in almost every country of the world, pouring, one hopes, Ceylon Tea. But although tea is now synonymous with Kandy, it was something of a latecomer to the city’s attributes.

Just outside the city centre is Giragama, a tea factory set amongst several tea hills, which offers Stalinist-style tours and presentations. The factory is a short hop from where the very first tea bushes were grown on the island. Tea first arrived here in 1824, with plants smuggled from China to the Royal Botanical Gardens in Peradeniya. Now the island’s dominant culinary export, the crop began as an accidental discovery. Famous though the island is for its remarkable teas, it was first renowned for its coffee. In 1845, there were just 37,000 acres under cultivation, but by 1878, coffee estates covered 275,000 acres.

Tamil labourers arrived (70,000 per year at one point) to help the industry grow, and in 1867, a railway was built from Kandy to Colombo to carry coffee. It was, said the papers, a “coffee rush,” but one that benefited many, for a third of the estates were owned by native Sri Lankans. Investors flooded in, and by 1860, Sri Lanka was one of the three largest coffee-producing countries in the world.

But in 1869, just as it seemed as if the coffee boom would go on and on, the crop was hit by a killer disease - Hemileia vastatrix, "coffee rust” or “Devastating Emily” as the planters knew it. It took time to spread – but within thirty years, there were barely eleven thousand acres of the plant left. The industry was wiped out. That the country did not follow suit is thanks to a Scot named James Taylor and his experiments with tea. He emigrated to the island in 1852 to plant coffee and spotted early the effects of coffee rust. On his Loolecondera Estate in Kandy, he immediately started experimenting with tea until, from plant to teacup, he had mastered all the techniques and processes needed to succeed with this new crop.

In 1875, Taylor sent the first shipment of Ceylon tea to the London Tea Auction. Despairing coffee planters sat at Taylor’s feet to learn tea production. Within about 20 years, tea exports increased from around 80 tons to almost 23,000 tons in 1890. Tea had caught on. The few estates that made up the eleven hundred acres of planted tea back in 1875 had, by 1890, grown to two hundred and twenty thousand acres. Today, the country is the home of the cuppa. Its climate is perfect for the plant, and its modern history is in part moulded by it. Tea accounts for almost 2% of total GDP and directly or indirectly employs over a million people.

Terrain, climate, light, and wind shape quite different brews. The varied regions of the island make distinctively different teas, just as the other parts of France or Spain make such dissimilar wines. The most subtle tea is said to come from Nuwara Eliya. Here at six thousand feet, the climate is rugged, bracing, cold enough for frost, and best able to foster teas that are golden-hued with a delicate, fragrant bouquet.

A more balanced flavour comes at four to six thousand feet from the Uva region. Here, the bushes are caressed by both the NE & SW monsoons, and a drying Cachan ocean wind that closes the leaves, forcing a high balance of flavour. It is aromatic, mellow, and smooth. A very tangy-flavoured tea comes from Uda Pussellawa, at five to six thousand feet, a thinly populated region famed for rare plants & leopards, and is bombarded by the NE Monsoon, giving a strong, dark, pungent tea with a hint of rose.

From Dimbulla, at three to five thousand feet, comes a tea with an immaculate taste. The region is drenched by the SW monsoon, which brings crisp days, wet nights, and a complex terrain that produces a reddish tea, best known as English Breakfast Tea. Kandy, the first home of tea, is noted for its most classic of tea flavours. Here, the tea plantations are typically at 2,000 to 4,000 feet, to produce a bright, light, coppery tea with good strength, taste, and body.

 A more caramel flavour is found at a little over sea level - Sabaragamuwa, home to sapphires and humid rainforest. The region is hit by the SW monsoon, which makes for a robustly flavoured dark yellow-brown tea. The last and lowest-lying tea region is Ruhuna, which runs from the coast to the Sinharaja Rain Forest. The region is shielded from monsoons and has soil that promotes long, beautiful leaves that turn intensely black, making strong, full-flavoured dark teas.

Tasting all this delicious tea that emanates from so many different parts of the island is more than a little distracting – for the greatest irony in the country’s tale of tea is just how secretive its real origins have since become. Loolecondera, the estate where it all started, still exists just outside Kandy, surrounded by hills of tea – but it is almost entirely inaccessible. Determined tea adventurers with reliable four-wheel drives can just about make it up to the estate. But like so much in Kandy, it hides in plain sight. It is perhaps inevitable that anything given half a chance to become a secret will become so, though maybe this is truer in Kandy than elsewhere.

The only secret Kandy cannot really hide lies just outside the city centre: the Perediniya Royal Botanical Gardens. Here, glorious, drunken avenues of Cook's Pines, Palmyra Palms, Double Coconuts, Cabbage Palms, and Royal Palms lead off into shady dells. The garden was refashioned in 1821 and is today one of the finest, if not the finest, botanical gardens in Asia; the modern garden set up by Alexander Moon for the receipt and experimentation of plants introduced for commercial development. Moon’s catalogue, published soon afterwards, listed one thousand one hundred and twenty-seven “Ceylon plants.” 

This commercialisation of land was the start of a massive period of deforestation in the country. In 1881, 84% of Sri Lanka was forested. In less than 20 years, British colonial agriculture reduced forest coverage to just 70%.

Moon was one of a line of prodigious British gardeners in Sri Lanka, an enthusiastic enforcer of a project begun in 1810 under the advice of Sir Joseph Banks when a garden was opened on Slave Island in Colombo. In 1813, the garden moved to Kalutara, where there was more space for planting, before finally transferring to the better climate of Peradeniya. Now the gardens stretch over 150 acres, with 4,000 plant species filling the space.

Its palm collection is among the best in Asia, with about 220 species. Still, the garden’s chief glory is its arboretum of ten thousand trees, many over a hundred years old and relied upon to flower in stunning colours. Among them is a Javan fig tree with a canopy of about 1600 square meters.

There is even an arboretum of trees planted by famous people, including a huge Ironwood (Tsar Nicolas II), a somewhat stunted Camphor Tree (Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranaike), a Yellow Trumpet Tree (King Akihito of Japan), and a Sorrowless Tree (Queen Elizabeth II). A Cannonball Tree, planted in 1901 by King George V and Queen Mary of the United Kingdom, is, however, pipped to the post for age by the one growing at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel.

Its bamboo collection includes the giant bamboo of Burma, the largest known in the world, yellow building bamboo, feather bamboo, prickly bamboo, and Dwarf Chinese bamboo. The fern collection includes over a hundred indigenous and exotic species, whilst the Spice Garden houses the oldest nutmeg trees in the world, including ones planted in 1840.

To any Sri Lankan, the term “kumarihaami” is immediately graspable. On the surface, it appears to merely, and somewhat cautiously, describe elderly ladies who enjoy considerable influence within their family and community. But this in no way captures the degree of social richness, and power - shot through with often obstinate and glittering eccentricity - that is a proper Kumarihaami. A cross between a dowager duchess and an exiled Queen, her word is law, and her recommendations ignored at your very considerable peril. Nancy Aster, the Empress Dowager Cixi, or the fictional Dowager Countess of Grantham in “Downtown Abby” are all good foreign examples. Sri Lankan examples today can be found in any town or village on the island. Or, better still, on the pages of many a contemporary Sri Lankan novel, not least Ashok Ferrey’s “The Ceaseless Chatter of Demons.” Peradeniya’s Royal Botanical Gardens, one hopes, has something of the Kumarihaami about it. Managed by a government department that excels as much in bureaucracy as in horticulture, its attributes, like those of the eternal dowager, imply that it will go on and on forever. This much, I hope, is true: “When great trees fall in forests,” said Maya Angelou, “small things recoil into silence, their senses eroded beyond fear.”

That was a production written and recorded by David Swarbirck at The Ceylon Press, based in the jungle north of Kandy at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and set up to tell the story of Sri Lanka.