The Nilgiris

Cold enough for frost in January — a cold the rest of South India doesn't experience. The mist sits in the valleys most mornings and dissolves by ten. When it clears, the light is thin and almost northern.

Not solid forest — a mosaic of open grassland and pockets of stunted shola. Tea was planted into this mosaic, not instead of it. The grasslands were kept, because removing them would change what the garden is growing inside.

Two leaves and a bud, by hand, returned to again and again through the growing season. A picker who has worked the same rows for years is not following a method. They are reading something — the state of the plant, the light, the timing — that no guide describes. The reading is the skill.