A Century of Silence Ends in the High Hills of Nuwara Eliya

Dr. Bathiya Gopallawa and a team of estate workers have returned a plant species missing for over 100 years to the mountain slopes of the Queensberry Estate. By identifying a surviving mother plant in a remote ravine, the team has begun the slow process of restoring a lost highland resident to its native soil.

The archival records in Peradeniya are often the only testimony of what once grew in the central hills of Sri Lanka. In those old folders, botanical specimens are sometimes found pressed against colonial-era newspapers, the ink of 19th-century commerce leaving faint, reversed marks on the preserved flora. To find a living specimen at Queensberry Estate was to find a bridge across that history, a survivor of the era when vast tracts of montane forest were cleared for coffee and tea.

The plant had found a sanctuary in a "micro-refugia"—a patch of forest too steep or rocky for the colonial axes to reach. These small pockets of original wilderness, scattered among the 200,000 hectares of modern tea plantations, remain the final strongholds for the island’s endemic highland flora. The species survives here through a physiological patience, its thick, waxy leaves evolved to resist the structural damage of the relentless mountain winds.

The rediscovery, supported by the Wildlife and Nature Protection Society and Hemas Holdings, moved quickly from identification to propagation. In the Dilmah Conservation nursery, seedlings were raised from the mother plant with the meticulous care required for a species with no other living peers. When the time came for replanting, the task was shared with the estate workers who navigate these slopes daily. By learning to recognize the specific curve of the leaf, these men and women have transitioned from the labor of the plantation to the stewardship of the mountain's oldest residents.

Near the original mother plant, the new seedlings have been tucked into the earth. It is a quiet restoration, a gesture of decency toward a landscape that has been transformed by industry but still holds the capacity for renewal. The return of this single species does not rewrite the history of the highlands, but it ensures that a lineage nearly broken by the 19th century now has a foothold in the 21st.