India

It was the British who introduced and organised tea growing in India. They created large tea plantations called tea estates. Keen to retain the comforts of home, they built charming, typically British cottage-style houses.
When I visited the Thiashola Tea Estate in India, I was lucky enough to be able to stay in this tea grower’s house. It dates back to the nineteenth century. Nestled on the edge of the jungle, it overlooks the tea, the clouds and the Deccan plain. What a joy to arrive there, surrounded by flowers, to contemplate this unique landscape and enjoy its rare silence. A feeling of being at the edge of the world. Total isolation. The moment I loved best: at dawn, pulling on a sweater, going outside and sitting on the front steps, a bowl of steaming tea in my hands, admiring the glowing red sky as the sun rose.

On the tea plantations in India, there is a system for looking after the babies and infants. The babies are placed in hanging cribs while their mothers pluck the tea leaves in the fields. There is no roof, just a canopy. The mothers take turns to look after the little ones, rocking them while they sing lullabies. As you walk around the tea plantations you often hear their gentle singing.

Sometimes you don’t even need a seed to produce a tea plant, in fact it’s very common not to. Instead, you take cuttings from a carefully chosen parent plant. You remove one tea leaf together with a few centimetres of the shoot, and plant the whole thing in compost. The roots then form and the shoot grows into a mature tea plant. The covered area where these young shoots grow is called a nursery. Photo taken in Darjeeling, India.

The tea plant doesn’t like a very dry climate or very strong sunshine. That’s why you often find tea growing in misty landscapes. In a few minutes the weather changes, the hilltops disappear, the outlines of the trees become blurred, the temperature drops and you find yourself in the middle of a cloud, like here in Thiashola, a magnificent tea plantation in southern India.

How could I have showed you the seed of the tea plant and not talked about the tea flower? So here it is, and if you’re thinking that it looks like a camellia, then you’re right, because the tea plant is a member of the large camellia family.
In the tea plantations you see very few flowers. Because the young shoots are picked throughout the year, the tea plant is prevented from flowering, it is frustrated, you could say. The tea plant puts all its energy into growing leaves, so if you see a tea plant covered in flowers it’s not a good sign: it means the plantation is a bit neglected and the harvesting isn’t done regularly, or else it means that the tea plant is old, because a mass of flowers is a sign of degeneration. This pretty little tea flower I wanted to show you was found at the Happy Valley tea plantation not far from the city of Darjeeling in India. It doesn’t have much of a scent, it’s just pretty to look at, especially because its bloom fades quickly.