Sunday, December 26, 2010

Space


One pleasing scenery travelling long distance across Anhui province is the presence of green. Whether in the form of natural foliage or human agriculture.

Where villages are, usually a concentration of simple white cement houses, whether tucked away at a valley or spreaded out on a plain, are usually surrounded by neat plots of vegetables or crops. Every inch of land around a house is definitely devoted to the growing of some edible plants.

Anhui's climate is suitable for tea growth. And it does have its own species of tea. Keemun (qimen) red (black tea is regarded as red tea) tea is one of those.

Passed by lots of tea bushes along the journey, however, they are not planted in large scale. Mainly in the form of small, squeezed in between vegetables and crops or grown simply to fill up the space of arable lands. Therefore, some of these tea bushes are grown in the weirdest places, like the slopes of a steep gradient, in a corner of a forest, on a ridge and many are actually far off from villages. They look more like the results of re-aforestation, rather than planted for use.