17 



All the land is planted to tea or used for the native villages and 

 their accompanying rice fields. The shade trees used in the 

 tea gardens at present are almost all Para rubber and the planter 

 expects to get two crops from the same land, one of rubber and 

 one of tea. It is doubtful whether this practice is a good one, 

 for even here the altitude is too high for rubber and scarcely 

 high enough for first-class tea. Other species of shade trees 

 have been used in the past, especially eucalyptus and Australian 

 oak, and a few specimens of these are still remaining. 



Very little land is wasted in tea estates. There seems to be 

 no soil too rocky nor no hillside too steep to be planted. Not far 

 from the garden a huge boulder, almost an acre in extent, had 

 one small pocket of soil almost in the middle and in this pocket 

 five or six plants of tea were growing. There is some waste 

 land along the river and at the edge of the native plantations, 

 but this is occupied generally by the common weeds of the region 

 and we really had no experience with the native fiora of this 

 part of Ceylon. 



(To be continued) 



