Monsoon, Magic & Money: Sri Lanka, The Spice Trade & A Jungle Garden

Field guide; saga; pharmacy; pantry - this memoir of the Spice Garden at The Flame Tree Estate and Hotel in the jungle northwest of Kandy confirms that most elemental of Sri Lankan horticultural truths – that plants – all 7,500 of them found here – divide into just three categories. They are medicinal. They are edible. Or they are useless. 

 

Had we known this before things kicked off, life would have been much simpler, and plans far more straightforward. For, as with most plans, ours went off-mission within months, pursued across the neat pages of Excel by the best-intentioned of mission creeps. But God, as they say, is good; and no good God has much truck with plans of any sort. It took years to properly understand what a release this Plan Wilderness was, and just how unconditionally that most office Gulag of conditions had been trounced. Enslavement is a condition that takes time to undo. Even now, years later, I still place thankful and imaginary offerings of flowers and fruit before the altar of my imagined gods. As Mark Twain noted, “to succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.”

 

Servitude had begun to slide off, albeit unnoticed, just after the ceremonial signing of deeds to buy Mudhenna Wallawwa, the ancient, crumbling plantation house and estate in the jungle northwest of Kandy. Over 30 people representing the sellers, attended by scores more, met in an echoing room around a table that must have been related in some complex wooden way to the State Banquet table in Windsor Castle. Signatories, witnesses, supporters, attestors, senior and junior legal counsels, tea bearers and not a few passers-by transmuted the transfer of a deed into a Dhurbar.

 

The plantation came with twenty-five acres of land that had long since reverted to jungle, though rampant hints of what once grew in smug order (rubber, cocoa, coffee, coconut) could still be glimpsed. The estate had been abandoned during the 1988 JVP civil war, the family fleeing to the greater safety of Colombo. And, as with all things tropical, the land settled back comfortably into the loving hands of nature, with a sigh, as if all that building and harvesting, planting, and living was in some inexpressible way, a trifling and passing distraction, now best forgotten.

 

But possessing land is habit-forming. And soon enough, our acquisition was followed by the purchase of more acres. And another house. Further acres, once part of the wider estate before Land Reforms decimated it, were incorporated on long-term leases until the estate had more than doubled in size, the various land parcels threaded together by the slimmest of jungle tracks. 

 

One large plot was planted with vegetable beds, but lay so close to a misbehaving river that the onions, carrots, and sweet potatoes had little choice but to fester and moulder. Another was set aside to grow sandalwood trees. This, as it turned out, was a poor choice. Glamorous though the trees undoubtedly are, keeping them in the style to which they wish to become accustomed is more complicated even than keeping a mistress in Paris. The slightest variation in water caused sulky dieback. The tree’s high-maintenance root system, which demanded the presence of other plant roots to attach to, meant a continual need to throw what amounted to hedonistic horticultural parties. When all that had been sorted, Sandalwood Spike Disease arrived.

 

An entire valley was planted out with thousands of bananas, all of which succumbed to Fusarium wilt. Lemon grass was seeded on well-drained hill sides, most of which caught fire during the drought. Mushrooms, a great favourite of our auditor, were added - more out of good manners than any genuine attempt to be commercial. 

 

The old rubber terraces were entrusted to a horticultural bandit who lacerated the trees to produce quick flows of sap, injuring them for years to come. Terraces of new rubber trees were established. “Harvest the latex,” advised one enterprising land agent, “and move up the value chain.” Make didoes,” he went on to suggest: “the few on sale on the island are all expensive imports.”

 

Greenhouses for tomato and pepper were built and grown for the Maldivian hotel market until Spotted Wilt Virus raced through the plants, leaving behind fruit only the angriest chef might use. Several acres' worth of nurseries to raise cinnamon, cloves, and erica nuts were built, the tiny plants intended for resale to the local agriculture board, though porcupines, gathering in force for nightly raids, had alternative ideas.

 

As the estate’s plantation workers grew into a small army, supervisors with, it turned out, imperfect circadian rhythms, were recruited to manage and mentor the mildly mutinous troops. On the hottest days, sleeping under the shade of mango trees seemed the only option. One manager, tempted to distraction by thoughts of ill-got lucre, was later to be seen gazing woefully out from behind the bars of the castellated Bogambara Prison in downtown Kandy, built by the British and home to a grisly record of 524 executions, including that of the glamorous Sura Saradiel, the island’s fabled Robin Hood.

 

The only plants that readily seemed to work were spices. Ah – the wisdom of hindsight! The first of these rare flowering marvels was several acres of pepper planted to scramble up nitrogen-fixing gliricidia sticks. The vines proved valiantly resistant to animal attack; they were just glad to throw off long green clusters of pepper grapes. Plantations of clove trees also seemed to flourish, and in one distant corner of the estate, cinnamon, that most magical of all Sri Lanka’s indigenous spices, prospered with a lack of neediness that might move a hardened planter to tears of wonder and gratitude. 

 

Emboldened, we tried vanilla. Now, as any spreadsheet junkie might tell you, vanilla is the sure route to becoming an overnight millionaire. As more and more people eat more and more chocolate, cocoa beans have barely managed to keep up with demand, with export prices oscillating between $350 $670 per kilo.

 

Our first crop was interplanted with our sad, and still in-recovery, rubber trees – by Francis, an aged and devoted Catholic plantation worker whose ancestry, once deciphered from a tin box of antique family documents going back to the 1890s, came in part from Scotland. Ever the old-fashioned Scot, Francis was as fond of whiskey as he was of God. Every vanilla cutting was blessed before it was planted, his hand waving the form of the cross across the ambitious little plants. Completing the bedding-in of this new plantation took considerable time, and it became clear that, though shade-loving, the amount of shade they had to endure under the rubber trees was just all too much.

 

Francis set to work, digging up each consecrated plant and transferring them to a new plantation, more open to sunlight, which corkscrewed down to a small pond. But the sanctified plants were no less miserable in their new spot, fighting off fungal rot and periods when the water on offer was either too much or too little. And eventually they were moved a third time, though by now not by Francis, who had left to meet his Maker.

 

In their new position and under the mindful eye of Ananda, now our head gardener, the vines finally prospered. As the first vanilla pods emerged, so too did the late but gratifying realisation that the best jungle gardening to be had was to stick to spices. We divested ourselves of the wilder outlying parts of the estate and focused our planting efforts on the twenty-five acres most immediately around us. By then, their easy, relatively effortless growth had made a compelling argument. But more than that, they had woven a most persuasive spell as well. They seemed to sit up there along with gods, language, myths, music and miniature schnauzers, parts of our shared human existence, able to retain an elemental magic and as impervious as a seam of gold to all attempts to mine them or reduce them to something merely transactional.

 

As we learnt their stories, histories, homes, admirers, and journeys, they formed an accretion of remembrances that explained why they stayed the course as they moved from jungle and moor to supermarket shelf and checkout. Even now, they are much, much more than mere bottles of dried flavour. One whiff of pepper or cardamom, cinnamon or cloves is sufficient to conjure up places and memories as potent as the sound any seashell makes of the sea when you place it to your ear.

 

In the smell of each spice is much of the whole history of the world: its rulers, presents, writers, planters, merchants, alchemists, chefs, doctors. And it's great explorers. Marco Polo; Xuanzang, the seventh-century Chinese Buddhist monk; Hippalus; Joao Ribeiro; Ibn Battuta; Vasco da Gama and Zheng He, the fifteenth-century Chinese admiral. Like gold, silk or the tin that produced the Bronze Age, spices were the impetus for a significant part of the ancient world’s economic explosion, opening sea and land routes, connecting east to west, and exposing cultures, ideas, languages, religions, and technologies to societies that had never before heard of one another.

 

They started their journey, of course, on foot - prehistoric land routes – from Africa into the Middle East; from Australasia and Indonesia into China; and then from both directions towards India. 

 

By the time the civilisations of the ancient world were stirring, these land routes had multiplied into sea routes – the maritime Silk Route, bringing Africa into contact with SE Asia through India, and Sri Lanka, which sat like a belly button in the middle. The very centrality of Sri Lanka was to prove its commercial making. Cosmas Indicopleustes, a Greek writing in the sixth century CE, noted that “the island being, as it is, in a central position, is much frequented by ships from all parts of India and from Persia and Ethiopia; and it likewise sends out many of its own. And for the remote countries…it receives silk, aloes, cloves, sandalwood, and other products, and these again are passed onto marts on this side, such as Male, where peppers grow…”

 

Monsoon winds filled the sails of cargo boats along the Swahili Coast and on the western seaboard of India, right across to the ports of Java. Predictable as clockwork, these annual winds allowed merchants to fund long journeys within fast, predictable, and relatively safe seasons. From May to September, the southwestern monsoon blows from the west to the east, helping ships sail from Africa and the Arab world to Asia. Between November and March, the northeastern monsoon takes boats in the opposite direction. Budgets could be made, profit measured, and risks taken.

 

By medieval times, these routes expanded dramatically at either end to bring the whole of Europe, and Central Asia into the mix – though the engine still sat squarely within the Indian Ocean – in ports like Zanzibar, Mogadishu, Hormuz, Calicut, Malacca, and across the coastline of Sri Lanka itself. 

 

Mathottam in Mannar, in the northwest of Sri Lanka, became a key trading hub for spices, pearls, ceramics, and ivory. North of Jaffna, Dambakola Patuna became another such hub, famous for later welcoming the sacred Bo tree into the country. Close by, the port of Urathota Kayts specialised in shipping horses and elephants. It is clear from inscriptions discovered there from around the middle of the twelfth century CE how finely regulated was this trade, with one reading “if the vessels bringing elephants and horses to us get wrecked, a fourth shall be taken by the treasury and the other three parts shall be left to the owner…”

 

By the sixth century, the ancient port of Gokanna – now Trincomalee – was welcoming merchants from China, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Greece, Rome, India, and Persia, all drawn in part by its ideally provided resources for ship repair, easy docking in a huge safe harbour and the availability of plenty of fresh water and food. Some merchants continued their journey from the port into the Mahaweli River, deep into the island itself. Further south, the port of Godawaya, near Hambantota, prospered. In fact, historians have recently demonstrated how almost a third of all Roman coins found on the island come from the southwest coast, indicating that its ports were of great significance from the earliest times. Godawaya itself is recoded as returning to the Anuradhapura kingdom notable amounts of tax revenue from the second century CE.

 

Very little is known about how Sri Lanka, through its own shipbuilding and merchant fleets, moved beyond its role as a trade hub to take a more active role in transportation. Still, marine historians have begun to believe that at least until the late tenth century CE, the island was active and capable of making ocean-going cargo boats, constructed from wood and held together by coconut fibre ropes that were sufficiently robust as to work the seas between India, the Maldives and up to present-day Pakistan.

 

Soon enough, what had begun with a breeze in a few sails became an armada of vessels from Europe as the first European colonists set out to break the monopoly of the Indian Ocean trade and take it over for themselves. “He who controls the spice,” observed Frank Herbert, messianically, in the novel Dune, “controls the universe.”

 

First came the fifteenth-century Portuguese who established ports, routes and colonies in East Africa, southwestern India and the islands around the Javan Sea, fuelled by the cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and pepper of Southeast Asia. Breaking the Arab traders' monopoly, they took over the lucrative trade – until the Dutch stepped in.

 

With the establishment of the Dutch East India Company in 1602, the Portuguese stranglehold over the spice trade was broken. The Dutch brought with them a draconianly more commercial mindset, setting up Sri Lanka as a de facto cinnamon estate, shortening the trade routes dramatically and developing across the island an infrastructure of canals such as the famous Hamilton Canal, which linked Negombo to Colombo; roads; large, professionally managed commercial plantations especially around Negombo; and stringent laws to maximize what was to become one of the most profitable monopolies the world had ever seen.  Huge fines and, sometimes, deportation to Africa were imposed on anyone who cut down a cinnamon tree, wild or otherwise, without permission.

 

When the British began the final expulsion of the Dutch across Sri Lanka from 1796, the cinnamon monopoly fell into their hands – but only momentarily. British control of Sri Lanka coincided with the natural dissolution of the global cinnamon monopoly. Plantations that had sprung up in places as far apart as Java to the West Indies were now producing the spice, and merely trying to control it at the Sri Lankan end made little commercial sense anymore. In 1833, the market was opened, by which time the British had introduced a wealth of new crops to Sri Lanka, including tea, coffee, and rubber.

 

But by then, Sri Lanka, by virtue of its spices, had drawn into its heart all manner of things, good and bad, from Buddhism to Love Cakes. Everything the country is today comes, at least in part, from the magnetic draw it first exerted on the rest of the world.

 

And although the spice trade has moved on, with India now accounting for 75 per cent of the world’s total metric tons of spices and Sri Lanka barely 1 per cent, the island still prides itself on the quality, not the quantity, of its spices. And in this spice connoisseurs agree - for Sri Lankan cinnamon or pepper, for example, have a caviar quality of taste and perfume that plays with bewitching delight to the senses, as do no others. 

 

Yet the very earliest trade in spices was as much, if not more, promoted by their medicinal qualities as by their culinary impact, a feature that is wholly reversed today. Such spices as cinnamon, turmeric, cinnamon or pepper were known and neatly incorporated into the traditional remedies used by medics of the first ancient societies - the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptian; the Xia, Shang, Zhou, Qin and Han of ancient China; and the Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, and Phoenicians in what is today the Middle East.  

 

And within all of South Asia - and parts of SE Asia - Ayurveda, the 5,000-year-old Vedic Indian holistic medicine system, had long since integrated spices into the treatments and therapies that were commonplace across the Indian sub-continent. The development of Western science since the early modern period refocused attention away from many of the health benefits of these spices, and empirical scientific research worldwide is only now beginning to catch up on their benefits.

 

As societies became more sophisticated and consumer preferences increasingly influenced economies, the culinary benefits of spices turbocharged their use and exchange. Cooking, after all, is a form of psychotherapy, marvellously mood-changing. Many spices contribute to the texture and colour of food. Many also aid food preservation and increase its nutritional value. And all spices, to some degree or another, enhance the flavour of food and add to its aroma, turning what is simple into something compellingly complex and delicious. But in this matter, democracy quite breaks down, for not all spices are equal. 

 

Some, a very few, play the part that red, yellow, and blue do in painting – primary colours from which all others are derived. These primary spices do more than merely complement a dish; they set the tone, establishing the foundational flavours that await your palate. Food writers and chefs argue long and hard about the rightful membership of the list – but most seem to agree on the top nine: turmeric; cinnamon; pepper; cardamom; cloves; chilli; coriander; cumin and ginger. And of these, the first three are among Sri Lanka’s most famous indigenous plants. 

 

Buyers within today’s spice world have shown themselves more than happy to pay out for real quality. Sri Lanka’s gardens, plantations and estates contribute one billion dollars to the twenty-five billion dollar total that is the value of the global spice market – a sturdy total for a small country that has just 0.04% of the planet's total land mass.

 

Sri Lanka’s bountiful landscapes, lavish rainfall, rich soils, wider ranging temperatures, and generous range of microclimates from coasts to cloud forest, scrubland to jungle, ensure that there is always somewhere where every spice will grow to its best possible advantage. 

 

Cynics say all you need to do is chuck in a few seeds or cuttings into Sri Lanka’s soil, and they will grow with a profusion that needs little human encouragement. And whilst it is undoubtedly true that in the hills, which make up twenty per cent of the island’s land mass, the climate, monsoons, soils, and weather patterns make for an almost alarming fecundity, growing spices still requires a bit more care than the random scattering of plants across hills.

 

Spice gardens exist in most parts of the country, but most especially in the highlands around Kandy, where the balance of climatic and environmental conditions is, as Voltaire might have stated, had he called in on Kandy, “all for the best in the best of possible worlds.”  Here, a striking form of gardening unique to the island comes into play – the Kandyan gardening technique, a system developed in this region 500 years ago. 

 

The technique, still practised here, is open to anyone with a garden – and a mindset to plant it so it mimics a tropical rainforest. Dig for Victory never looked so good. Erosion is minimised, fallen leaves keep soil temperatures at kinder levels, and fertility is enhanced.

 

It is as if a sumo wrestler had squeezed himself into a pair of shinny jeans. In spaces of an acre or two – and often less than that - taller trees are interplanted with shorter ones. Shrubs, creepers, and ground cover are allowed to prosper. The resulting fusion garden typically includes jackfruit, mahogany, mango, teak, avocado; smaller fruits like banana, papaya, rambutan, and guava; medicinal trees like beli and neem; vegetables; ornamental plants, orchids, ferns, and crotons – and of course as many spice plants as can be squeezed in. The multi-layered garden that busts out has astonishing biodiversity – and an embarrassment of virtues: a self-sustaining ecosystem that boosts soil health and plant resilience to disease.

 

But of all the spices that adorn it, it is remarkable to note that barely ten can genuinely be regarded as native to the island: moringa, long pepper, gutu kula, curry leaves, brindleberry, lemongrass, the blue butterfly pea flower, turmeric, and the two spices that stand head and shoulders above the rest: cinnamon and pepper. 

 

The rest all came here by accident or design. Arab traders brought cardamom from the Western Ghats of Southern India, as well as fenugreek and possibly cloves and pandam leaves: the British imported nutmeg and mace to break the Portuguese and Dutch monopolies over these spices in Indonesia. 

 

Vanilla, a plant native to South America, arrived via the Portuguese. Chilli peppers, also originally from the Americas, reached Sri Lanka in the sixteenth century. Three classic Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and African spices – tamarind, coriander, cumin, and fennel – arrived here on trade routes powered by the Arabs. As did ginger, which originated in the Pacific region of Southeast Asia.

 

Had none of this occurred, Sri Lanka’s cuisine would be a rather austere affair – virtuous as a vestal virgin - but little removed from eating water biscuits. Every eager gourmand from Nero to Oscar Wilde would have felt alienated.

 

Imagine curry – that catch-all dish – without chilli, coriander, cumin, or fennel. Or the luscious banana-leaf-wrapped Lamprais that the Dutch brought with them from Indonesia – but without their heady aroma of cardamom, cloves, black pepper, and cinnamon. Picture Sr Lankan Butter Cake or the Love Cake introduced by the Portuguese, but without vanilla. Sambal without ginger. Watalappam without cinnamon – dishes brought here by Malay migrants. Butch Sri Lankan Bruedher Bread without nutmeg. Or Rassam tamarind soup – but without tamarind. It is like imagining prison.

 

Throughout every century, the island has not only welcomed new spice species but also new dishes and recipes, integrating them into its local cuisine, making them almost as endemic as the Purple-faced Langur Monkey or the Sri Lankan Blue Magpie - animals found nowhere else in the world but here.

 

And this, then, is what we sought to get somewhere close to in a wild plot of shaded land that lay behind the kitchen gardens of The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, northwest of Kandy in the very centre of Sri Lanka.

 

Old clove and wild jack trees shade this chunk of land, together with some of the 100-year-old coconuts that dot the whole estate. A large pomelo grows, its fruit harvested by our chefs to make extra chunky marmalade. In March and October, the ground is strewn with the crunchy, sweet-sour Veralu fruits of the Ceylon Olive, and between May and August with the giant fruits of the pungent Durian. A massive Ceylon Oak, under whose roots lie the graves of three of the last working elephants on the estate, casts its greater shade across the space. Out beyond its branches, you glimpse the high hills that surround the estate and that mark the point at which the flat plains of the west and north of the island rise into the Central Highlands with its entanglement of mountains and valleys. And all its wild animals. In creating just such a space at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, it became instantly apparent that it was not just humans who like spices. So too did animals. Monkeys craved cardamom, and wild boar were thrilled by turmeric roots. Insatiable civets, porcupine, bats, pangolins, deer, squirrels, and any number of birds- they all gathered to spice up their usual diet with – well, spices. 

 

It was here, in the still months of the COVID pandemic, that our butlers, chefs, gardeners, housekeeping, under the eye of Angelo, our general manager, laid out the first terraces of our bespoke spice garden. It's lies just beyond The Spice Kitchen, a building put up at the same time and built in the most traditional of ways, using bamboo, mud, leftovers, and love. It's like it can be seen all across Sri Lanka, though the use for this one is as a staff hideaway, tearoom, and sometimes crèche. Its name – The Hockin’s Spice Garden – is in memory of two sassy polyamorous Methodist family cousins who lived, unconventionally, ménage à trois, with a German POW on their remote Cornish farm for 50 years. Their three graves, side by side, overlook the sea near Morwenstow. They were said to have occasionally travelled to nearby Barnstable and Bude, but never any further afield. Somehow, remembering them here in the jungles of Sri Lanka seems oddly more fitting.

 

_________________________________________________________________________________________

That was a production from 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.

 

The complete list of podcast series from The Ceylon Press includes:

 

1.           The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka

2.           Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast

3.           Complete Audio Books About Sri Lanka

4.           Poetry From The Jungle

5.           The Jungle Diaries

6.           The Archaeologies Diaries

 

What is The Sri Lanka Podcast: Island Stories?

From elephants to sapphires, tea to cricket, Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast explores a remote and secret Eden to discover the stories behind the things that make Sri Lanka, Sri Lankan. 

Welcome to an episode of Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast, brought to you by The Ceylon Press.
_________________________________________________________________________________________

Field guide; saga; pharmacy; pantry - this memoir of the Spice Garden at The Flame Tree Estate and Hotel in the jungle northwest of Kandy confirms that most elemental of Sri Lankan horticultural truths – that plants – all 7,500 of them found here – divide into just three categories. They are medicinal. They are edible. Or they are useless.

Had we known this before things kicked off, life would have been much simpler, and plans far more straightforward. For, as with most plans, ours went off-mission within months, pursued across the neat pages of Excel by the best-intentioned of mission creeps. But God, as they say, is good; and no good God has much truck with plans of any sort. It took years to properly understand what a release this Plan Wilderness was, and just how unconditionally that most office Gulag of conditions had been trounced. Enslavement is a condition that takes time to undo. Even now, years later, I still place thankful and imaginary offerings of flowers and fruit before the altar of my imagined gods. As Mark Twain noted, “to succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.”

Servitude had begun to slide off, albeit unnoticed, just after the ceremonial signing of deeds to buy Mudhenna Wallawwa, the ancient, crumbling plantation house and estate in the jungle northwest of Kandy. Over 30 people representing the sellers, attended by scores more, met in an echoing room around a table that must have been related in some complex wooden way to the State Banquet table in Windsor Castle. Signatories, witnesses, supporters, attestors, senior and junior legal counsels, tea bearers and not a few passers-by transmuted the transfer of a deed into a Dhurbar.

The plantation came with twenty-five acres of land that had long since reverted to jungle, though rampant hints of what once grew in smug order (rubber, cocoa, coffee, coconut) could still be glimpsed. The estate had been abandoned during the 1988 JVP civil war, the family fleeing to the greater safety of Colombo. And, as with all things tropical, the land settled back comfortably into the loving hands of nature, with a sigh, as if all that building and harvesting, planting, and living was in some inexpressible way, a trifling and passing distraction, now best forgotten.

But possessing land is habit-forming. And soon enough, our acquisition was followed by the purchase of more acres. And another house. Further acres, once part of the wider estate before Land Reforms decimated it, were incorporated on long-term leases until the estate had more than doubled in size, the various land parcels threaded together by the slimmest of jungle tracks.

One large plot was planted with vegetable beds, but lay so close to a misbehaving river that the onions, carrots, and sweet potatoes had little choice but to fester and moulder. Another was set aside to grow sandalwood trees. This, as it turned out, was a poor choice. Glamorous though the trees undoubtedly are, keeping them in the style to which they wish to become accustomed is more complicated even than keeping a mistress in Paris. The slightest variation in water caused sulky dieback. The tree’s high-maintenance root system, which demanded the presence of other plant roots to attach to, meant a continual need to throw what amounted to hedonistic horticultural parties. When all that had been sorted, Sandalwood Spike Disease arrived.

An entire valley was planted out with thousands of bananas, all of which succumbed to Fusarium wilt. Lemon grass was seeded on well-drained hill sides, most of which caught fire during the drought. Mushrooms, a great favourite of our auditor, were added - more out of good manners than any genuine attempt to be commercial.

The old rubber terraces were entrusted to a horticultural bandit who lacerated the trees to produce quick flows of sap, injuring them for years to come. Terraces of new rubber trees were established. “Harvest the latex,” advised one enterprising land agent, “and move up the value chain.” Make didoes,” he went on to suggest: “the few on sale on the island are all expensive imports.”

Greenhouses for tomato and pepper were built and grown for the Maldivian hotel market until Spotted Wilt Virus raced through the plants, leaving behind fruit only the angriest chef might use. Several acres' worth of nurseries to raise cinnamon, cloves, and erica nuts were built, the tiny plants intended for resale to the local agriculture board, though porcupines, gathering in force for nightly raids, had alternative ideas.

As the estate’s plantation workers grew into a small army, supervisors with, it turned out, imperfect circadian rhythms, were recruited to manage and mentor the mildly mutinous troops. On the hottest days, sleeping under the shade of mango trees seemed the only option. One manager, tempted to distraction by thoughts of ill-got lucre, was later to be seen gazing woefully out from behind the bars of the castellated Bogambara Prison in downtown Kandy, built by the British and home to a grisly record of 524 executions, including that of the glamorous Sura Saradiel, the island’s fabled Robin Hood.

The only plants that readily seemed to work were spices. Ah – the wisdom of hindsight! The first of these rare flowering marvels was several acres of pepper planted to scramble up nitrogen-fixing gliricidia sticks. The vines proved valiantly resistant to animal attack; they were just glad to throw off long green clusters of pepper grapes. Plantations of clove trees also seemed to flourish, and in one distant corner of the estate, cinnamon, that most magical of all Sri Lanka’s indigenous spices, prospered with a lack of neediness that might move a hardened planter to tears of wonder and gratitude.

Emboldened, we tried vanilla. Now, as any spreadsheet junkie might tell you, vanilla is the sure route to becoming an overnight millionaire. As more and more people eat more and more chocolate, cocoa beans have barely managed to keep up with demand, with export prices oscillating between $350 $670 per kilo.

Our first crop was interplanted with our sad, and still in-recovery, rubber trees – by Francis, an aged and devoted Catholic plantation worker whose ancestry, once deciphered from a tin box of antique family documents going back to the 1890s, came in part from Scotland. Ever the old-fashioned Scot, Francis was as fond of whiskey as he was of God. Every vanilla cutting was blessed before it was planted, his hand waving the form of the cross across the ambitious little plants. Completing the bedding-in of this new plantation took considerable time, and it became clear that, though shade-loving, the amount of shade they had to endure under the rubber trees was just all too much.

Francis set to work, digging up each consecrated plant and transferring them to a new plantation, more open to sunlight, which corkscrewed down to a small pond. But the sanctified plants were no less miserable in their new spot, fighting off fungal rot and periods when the water on offer was either too much or too little. And eventually they were moved a third time, though by now not by Francis, who had left to meet his Maker.

In their new position and under the mindful eye of Ananda, now our head gardener, the vines finally prospered. As the first vanilla pods emerged, so too did the late but gratifying realisation that the best jungle gardening to be had was to stick to spices. We divested ourselves of the wilder outlying parts of the estate and focused our planting efforts on the twenty-five acres most immediately around us. By then, their easy, relatively effortless growth had made a compelling argument. But more than that, they had woven a most persuasive spell as well. They seemed to sit up there along with gods, language, myths, music and miniature schnauzers, parts of our shared human existence, able to retain an elemental magic and as impervious as a seam of gold to all attempts to mine them or reduce them to something merely transactional.

As we learnt their stories, histories, homes, admirers, and journeys, they formed an accretion of remembrances that explained why they stayed the course as they moved from jungle and moor to supermarket shelf and checkout. Even now, they are much, much more than mere bottles of dried flavour. One whiff of pepper or cardamom, cinnamon or cloves is sufficient to conjure up places and memories as potent as the sound any seashell makes of the sea when you place it to your ear.

In the smell of each spice is much of the whole history of the world: its rulers, presents, writers, planters, merchants, alchemists, chefs, doctors. And it's great explorers. Marco Polo; Xuanzang, the seventh-century Chinese Buddhist monk; Hippalus; Joao Ribeiro; Ibn Battuta; Vasco da Gama and Zheng He, the fifteenth-century Chinese admiral. Like gold, silk or the tin that produced the Bronze Age, spices were the impetus for a significant part of the ancient world’s economic explosion, opening sea and land routes, connecting east to west, and exposing cultures, ideas, languages, religions, and technologies to societies that had never before heard of one another.

They started their journey, of course, on foot - prehistoric land routes – from Africa into the Middle East; from Australasia and Indonesia into China; and then from both directions towards India.

By the time the civilisations of the ancient world were stirring, these land routes had multiplied into sea routes – the maritime Silk Route, bringing Africa into contact with SE Asia through India, and Sri Lanka, which sat like a belly button in the middle. The very centrality of Sri Lanka was to prove its commercial making. Cosmas Indicopleustes, a Greek writing in the sixth century CE, noted that “the island being, as it is, in a central position, is much frequented by ships from all parts of India and from Persia and Ethiopia; and it likewise sends out many of its own. And for the remote countries…it receives silk, aloes, cloves, sandalwood, and other products, and these again are passed onto marts on this side, such as Male, where peppers grow…”

Monsoon winds filled the sails of cargo boats along the Swahili Coast and on the western seaboard of India, right across to the ports of Java. Predictable as clockwork, these annual winds allowed merchants to fund long journeys within fast, predictable, and relatively safe seasons. From May to September, the southwestern monsoon blows from the west to the east, helping ships sail from Africa and the Arab world to Asia. Between November and March, the northeastern monsoon takes boats in the opposite direction. Budgets could be made, profit measured, and risks taken.

By medieval times, these routes expanded dramatically at either end to bring the whole of Europe, and Central Asia into the mix – though the engine still sat squarely within the Indian Ocean – in ports like Zanzibar, Mogadishu, Hormuz, Calicut, Malacca, and across the coastline of Sri Lanka itself.

Mathottam in Mannar, in the northwest of Sri Lanka, became a key trading hub for spices, pearls, ceramics, and ivory. North of Jaffna, Dambakola Patuna became another such hub, famous for later welcoming the sacred Bo tree into the country. Close by, the port of Urathota Kayts specialised in shipping horses and elephants. It is clear from inscriptions discovered there from around the middle of the twelfth century CE how finely regulated was this trade, with one reading “if the vessels bringing elephants and horses to us get wrecked, a fourth shall be taken by the treasury and the other three parts shall be left to the owner…”

By the sixth century, the ancient port of Gokanna – now Trincomalee – was welcoming merchants from China, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Greece, Rome, India, and Persia, all drawn in part by its ideally provided resources for ship repair, easy docking in a huge safe harbour and the availability of plenty of fresh water and food. Some merchants continued their journey from the port into the Mahaweli River, deep into the island itself. Further south, the port of Godawaya, near Hambantota, prospered. In fact, historians have recently demonstrated how almost a third of all Roman coins found on the island come from the southwest coast, indicating that its ports were of great significance from the earliest times. Godawaya itself is recoded as returning to the Anuradhapura kingdom notable amounts of tax revenue from the second century CE.

Very little is known about how Sri Lanka, through its own shipbuilding and merchant fleets, moved beyond its role as a trade hub to take a more active role in transportation. Still, marine historians have begun to believe that at least until the late tenth century CE, the island was active and capable of making ocean-going cargo boats, constructed from wood and held together by coconut fibre ropes that were sufficiently robust as to work the seas between India, the Maldives and up to present-day Pakistan.

Soon enough, what had begun with a breeze in a few sails became an armada of vessels from Europe as the first European colonists set out to break the monopoly of the Indian Ocean trade and take it over for themselves. “He who controls the spice,” observed Frank Herbert, messianically, in the novel Dune, “controls the universe.”

First came the fifteenth-century Portuguese who established ports, routes and colonies in East Africa, southwestern India and the islands around the Javan Sea, fuelled by the cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and pepper of Southeast Asia. Breaking the Arab traders' monopoly, they took over the lucrative trade – until the Dutch stepped in.

With the establishment of the Dutch East India Company in 1602, the Portuguese stranglehold over the spice trade was broken. The Dutch brought with them a draconianly more commercial mindset, setting up Sri Lanka as a de facto cinnamon estate, shortening the trade routes dramatically and developing across the island an infrastructure of canals such as the famous Hamilton Canal, which linked Negombo to Colombo; roads; large, professionally managed commercial plantations especially around Negombo; and stringent laws to maximize what was to become one of the most profitable monopolies the world had ever seen. Huge fines and, sometimes, deportation to Africa were imposed on anyone who cut down a cinnamon tree, wild or otherwise, without permission.

When the British began the final expulsion of the Dutch across Sri Lanka from 1796, the cinnamon monopoly fell into their hands – but only momentarily. British control of Sri Lanka coincided with the natural dissolution of the global cinnamon monopoly. Plantations that had sprung up in places as far apart as Java to the West Indies were now producing the spice, and merely trying to control it at the Sri Lankan end made little commercial sense anymore. In 1833, the market was opened, by which time the British had introduced a wealth of new crops to Sri Lanka, including tea, coffee, and rubber.

But by then, Sri Lanka, by virtue of its spices, had drawn into its heart all manner of things, good and bad, from Buddhism to Love Cakes. Everything the country is today comes, at least in part, from the magnetic draw it first exerted on the rest of the world.

And although the spice trade has moved on, with India now accounting for 75 per cent of the world’s total metric tons of spices and Sri Lanka barely 1 per cent, the island still prides itself on the quality, not the quantity, of its spices. And in this spice connoisseurs agree - for Sri Lankan cinnamon or pepper, for example, have a caviar quality of taste and perfume that plays with bewitching delight to the senses, as do no others.

Yet the very earliest trade in spices was as much, if not more, promoted by their medicinal qualities as by their culinary impact, a feature that is wholly reversed today. Such spices as cinnamon, turmeric, cinnamon or pepper were known and neatly incorporated into the traditional remedies used by medics of the first ancient societies - the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptian; the Xia, Shang, Zhou, Qin and Han of ancient China; and the Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, and Phoenicians in what is today the Middle East.

And within all of South Asia - and parts of SE Asia - Ayurveda, the 5,000-year-old Vedic Indian holistic medicine system, had long since integrated spices into the treatments and therapies that were commonplace across the Indian sub-continent. The development of Western science since the early modern period refocused attention away from many of the health benefits of these spices, and empirical scientific research worldwide is only now beginning to catch up on their benefits.

As societies became more sophisticated and consumer preferences increasingly influenced economies, the culinary benefits of spices turbocharged their use and exchange. Cooking, after all, is a form of psychotherapy, marvellously mood-changing. Many spices contribute to the texture and colour of food. Many also aid food preservation and increase its nutritional value. And all spices, to some degree or another, enhance the flavour of food and add to its aroma, turning what is simple into something compellingly complex and delicious. But in this matter, democracy quite breaks down, for not all spices are equal.

Some, a very few, play the part that red, yellow, and blue do in painting – primary colours from which all others are derived. These primary spices do more than merely complement a dish; they set the tone, establishing the foundational flavours that await your palate. Food writers and chefs argue long and hard about the rightful membership of the list – but most seem to agree on the top nine: turmeric; cinnamon; pepper; cardamom; cloves; chilli; coriander; cumin and ginger. And of these, the first three are among Sri Lanka’s most famous indigenous plants.

Buyers within today’s spice world have shown themselves more than happy to pay out for real quality. Sri Lanka’s gardens, plantations and estates contribute one billion dollars to the twenty-five billion dollar total that is the value of the global spice market – a sturdy total for a small country that has just 0.04% of the planet's total land mass.

Sri Lanka’s bountiful landscapes, lavish rainfall, rich soils, wider ranging temperatures, and generous range of microclimates from coasts to cloud forest, scrubland to jungle, ensure that there is always somewhere where every spice will grow to its best possible advantage.

Cynics say all you need to do is chuck in a few seeds or cuttings into Sri Lanka’s soil, and they will grow with a profusion that needs little human encouragement. And whilst it is undoubtedly true that in the hills, which make up twenty per cent of the island’s land mass, the climate, monsoons, soils, and weather patterns make for an almost alarming fecundity, growing spices still requires a bit more care than the random scattering of plants across hills.

Spice gardens exist in most parts of the country, but most especially in the highlands around Kandy, where the balance of climatic and environmental conditions is, as Voltaire might have stated, had he called in on Kandy, “all for the best in the best of possible worlds.” Here, a striking form of gardening unique to the island comes into play – the Kandyan gardening technique, a system developed in this region 500 years ago.

The technique, still practised here, is open to anyone with a garden – and a mindset to plant it so it mimics a tropical rainforest. Dig for Victory never looked so good. Erosion is minimised, fallen leaves keep soil temperatures at kinder levels, and fertility is enhanced.

It is as if a sumo wrestler had squeezed himself into a pair of shinny jeans. In spaces of an acre or two – and often less than that - taller trees are interplanted with shorter ones. Shrubs, creepers, and ground cover are allowed to prosper. The resulting fusion garden typically includes jackfruit, mahogany, mango, teak, avocado; smaller fruits like banana, papaya, rambutan, and guava; medicinal trees like beli and neem; vegetables; ornamental plants, orchids, ferns, and crotons – and of course as many spice plants as can be squeezed in. The multi-layered garden that busts out has astonishing biodiversity – and an embarrassment of virtues: a self-sustaining ecosystem that boosts soil health and plant resilience to disease.

But of all the spices that adorn it, it is remarkable to note that barely ten can genuinely be regarded as native to the island: moringa, long pepper, gutu kula, curry leaves, brindleberry, lemongrass, the blue butterfly pea flower, turmeric, and the two spices that stand head and shoulders above the rest: cinnamon and pepper.

The rest all came here by accident or design. Arab traders brought cardamom from the Western Ghats of Southern India, as well as fenugreek and possibly cloves and pandam leaves: the British imported nutmeg and mace to break the Portuguese and Dutch monopolies over these spices in Indonesia.

Vanilla, a plant native to South America, arrived via the Portuguese. Chilli peppers, also originally from the Americas, reached Sri Lanka in the sixteenth century. Three classic Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and African spices – tamarind, coriander, cumin, and fennel – arrived here on trade routes powered by the Arabs. As did ginger, which originated in the Pacific region of Southeast Asia.

Had none of this occurred, Sri Lanka’s cuisine would be a rather austere affair – virtuous as a vestal virgin - but little removed from eating water biscuits. Every eager gourmand from Nero to Oscar Wilde would have felt alienated.

Imagine curry – that catch-all dish – without chilli, coriander, cumin, or fennel. Or the luscious banana-leaf-wrapped Lamprais that the Dutch brought with them from Indonesia – but without their heady aroma of cardamom, cloves, black pepper, and cinnamon. Picture Sr Lankan Butter Cake or the Love Cake introduced by the Portuguese, but without vanilla. Sambal without ginger. Watalappam without cinnamon – dishes brought here by Malay migrants. Butch Sri Lankan Bruedher Bread without nutmeg. Or Rassam tamarind soup – but without tamarind. It is like imagining prison.

Throughout every century, the island has not only welcomed new spice species but also new dishes and recipes, integrating them into its local cuisine, making them almost as endemic as the Purple-faced Langur Monkey or the Sri Lankan Blue Magpie - animals found nowhere else in the world but here.

And this, then, is what we sought to get somewhere close to in a wild plot of shaded land that lay behind the kitchen gardens of The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, northwest of Kandy in the very centre of Sri Lanka.

Old clove and wild jack trees shade this chunk of land, together with some of the 100-year-old coconuts that dot the whole estate. A large pomelo grows, its fruit harvested by our chefs to make extra chunky marmalade. In March and October, the ground is strewn with the crunchy, sweet-sour Veralu fruits of the Ceylon Olive, and between May and August with the giant fruits of the pungent Durian. A massive Ceylon Oak, under whose roots lie the graves of three of the last working elephants on the estate, casts its greater shade across the space. Out beyond its branches, you glimpse the high hills that surround the estate and that mark the point at which the flat plains of the west and north of the island rise into the Central Highlands with its entanglement of mountains and valleys. And all its wild animals. In creating just such a space at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, it became instantly apparent that it was not just humans who like spices. So too did animals. Monkeys craved cardamom, and wild boar were thrilled by turmeric roots. Insatiable civets, porcupine, bats, pangolins, deer, squirrels, and any number of birds- they all gathered to spice up their usual diet with – well, spices.

It was here, in the still months of the COVID pandemic, that our butlers, chefs, gardeners, housekeeping, under the eye of Angelo, our general manager, laid out the first terraces of our bespoke spice garden. It's lies just beyond The Spice Kitchen, a building put up at the same time and built in the most traditional of ways, using bamboo, mud, leftovers, and love. It's like it can be seen all across Sri Lanka, though the use for this one is as a staff hideaway, tearoom, and sometimes crèche. Its name – The Hockin’s Spice Garden – is in memory of two sassy polyamorous Methodist family cousins who lived, unconventionally, ménage à trois, with a German POW on their remote Cornish farm for 50 years. Their three graves, side by side, overlook the sea near Morwenstow. They were said to have occasionally travelled to nearby Barnstable and Bude, but never any further afield. Somehow, remembering them here in the jungles of Sri Lanka seems oddly more fitting.

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That was a production from 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.

The complete list of podcast series from The Ceylon Press includes:

1. The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka
2. Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast
3. Complete Audio Books About Sri Lanka
4. Poetry From The Jungle
5. The Jungle Diaries
6. The Archaeologies Diaries