Herbal and Spice Gardens

Several spice and herbal gardens operate along the roads between Kandy and Peradeniya, offering guided tours of their plantations. The tours walk you through living specimens of cinnamon, cardamom, pepper, cloves, nutmeg, vanilla, and dozens of Ayurvedic medicinal herbs, with explanations of how each is harvested and used. The gardens are commercially motivated — the tours end at a shop — but the educational content is genuinely interesting.

The Peradeniya Spice Garden and Ranawana Herbal Garden are among the better known. Entry is typically free with the expectation that you'll buy something, and the guides are knowledgeable. Allow an hour to ninety minutes.

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A story
Sri Lanka was the world's primary source of cinnamon for over two centuries. The Dutch, who controlled the island's coast from the 1640s to the 1790s, maintained a cinnamon monopoly so valuable that they peeled the bark of cinnamon trees as a form of taxation — if a tree died from over-peeling, the landholder was fined. The cinnamon cultivated in the Kandy hill country today is Ceylon cinnamon (Cinnamomum verum), genetically distinct from the cassia sold as "cinnamon" in most Western supermarkets and considerably more delicate in flavour.

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