With emerald hills sloping away in gentle curves, their contours softened by rolling mist that floats through the air like a quiet breath, Margaret’s Hope Tea Estate has become synonymous with Darjeeling over the 160 years since its founding in 1864.
A visit to the estate reveals layers of foliage blurring into one another as the sun peaks through clouds flashing on verdant tea bushes, dark pine, and moss-covered earth. The air feels cool and damp, carrying the scent of tea leaves and the feeling that thunder could clap at any time. The cottony mist thins and thickens as the light shifts, turning the hills into a living landscape – at times vivid and clear, sometimes hazy and dreamlike – but always peaceful yet full of life.
Its storied history evokes somber longing for a past that has simply just passed. The estate’s owner, The Goodricke Group of India (a subsidiary of the British company, Camelia PLC, the largest tea company in the world), is trying to write a new chapter in the story of Margaret’s Hope Estate. After more than a century and a half of doing things the same way, faced with challenges like labor shortages and rising costs, they are trying some innovations.
Goodricke is the second most prolific producer of tea across Darjeeling, Dooars/Terai, and Assam regions. But at least four of their five gardens in Darjeeling are their most prestigious holdings, where some of the finest teas in the world are made. Margaret’s Hope, Castleton, and Badamtam - all Goodricke estates are considered the best in the region, depending on which "expert" one may consult.
That they are experimenting with such a prestige garden demonstrates how serious the company is about responding to the times.
A Brief History of Margaret's Hope Tea Garden
It was first known as Bara Ringtong by the garden manager and was most likely first owned directly by the British East India Company, under which Dr. Archibald Cambell worked – first as superintendent of the sanitorium that the British had built in Darjeeling to help ailing and homesick British servicemen and bureaucrats recover from their ailments. However, he began experimenting with cultivating tea in the region. He found that the Chinese variety, Camelia sinensis var. sinensis, thrived under the cool, misty conditions of the hills, whereas the local variety, Camelia sinensis var. assamica, did better in the adjacent plains regions of Dooars-Terai and, of course, Assam, where they were first cultivated.
When the British Empire nationalized the company, they gave out 30-year leases to people who were de facto owners, sometimes also referred to as just managers.
One such owner/manager, J.G.D. Cruickshank, who held and managed the estate between 1900 and 1930, renamed the estate to Margaret’s Hope.
The Cruikshank family lived in London, and in 1927, as the story goes, he brought his wife and youngest daughter Margaret to the garden. She instantly fell in love with its breathtaking green slopes, the two rivers that run through it, and the lake that is home to the Himalayan salamander (the only place where the species can be found).
While she had to return to England when the vacation was over, it is said that her last words to her father upon departing Darjeeling were, “I hope to come back again to the garden.” Unfortunately, this was not to be, for Margaret did not survive the four-month seaborne journey back to England. She is said to have succumbed to a tropical disease, but how much of her ailment was affected by longing for the garden can only be imagined.
Her father became grief-stricken upon hearing the news, and locals say he wandered the garden as though haunted by the memories of that vacation. During one of these rambles, he is said to have had a vision of young Margaret sitting at her favorite spot in the tea garden. Believing it to be a message that her eternal soul still longed to return, he changed the name of the garden from Bara Ringtong to Margaret’s Hope in her remembrance.
Stories abound, even today, of sightings of a young white girl roaming around the garden, which many interpret as Margaret’s spirit visiting her garden.
Margaret's Hope Tea
Whether one believes the stories of Margaret’s periodic returns, what is not in doubt is that the tea cultivated at the garden, spanning around 1500 acres, stands among the finest teas in the world. This is especially true of its First Flush, which is light golden in color, powerfully aromatic with a floral bouquet and fruity nose. With orchard scents, it carries fruity notes, grape, melon, and honeysuckle. It is silky smooth in texture with a crisp light body, and hint of muscatel flavor.
While mostly China bush grows on the estate, newer AV 2 clone has been planted and found to do extremely well, especially in making specialty teas.
Challenges Faced by Goodricke in Darjeeling
Tea gardens the world over are generally being affected by climate change. It has resulted in sporadic weather conditions. Indeed, the recent cloudburst and flash flooding causing massive landslides, downing of bridges, washing away entire cliffsides along with roads, as well as 42 deaths, that occurred in October 2025 is demonstrative of the risks of posed by such extreme and unpredictable weather. What surprised planters the most is that October is not known for rain – but more rain fell than was recorded in most people’s lifetimes.
With increasingly harsh conditions on the rise, punishing heat in the summer, and sporadic rain causing landslides and injury, absenteeism, understandably, is on the rise at most Darjeeling gardens.
Moreover, the younger generation who have been educated by their parents long for careers in urban centers that make use of the knowledge they’ve attained at colleges and universities. Hence, the availability of labor in the next generation when current workers retire will be scarce.
Estate owners either need to entice workers to forgo life in the city by increasing wages and improving conditions – or bring in labor from other markets. That said, it’s not easy for someone used to life in the plains to work in the hills. Generations of living in hilly regions have made the Gurkha workers of Nepali origin in Darjeeling physically accustomed to working there. Studies have shown that highlanders have higher lung capacity, broader chest cavities, and lithe bodies and sturdy legs that make it easier to amble up slopes. Whether the adaptations are Darwinian or otherwise, they have been documented.
Finding a Solution
This has prompted companies to considered forms of mechanized plucking (which doesn’t necessarily mean automated because the level of leaf ready to be plucked is referred to as the leaf table) is not even in the hills as it is on flatlands.
For the first time in its history, Goodricke experimented with mechanical plucking – this too at one of its two most prized gardens, Margaret’s Hope.
Of course, they didn’t risk their first and second flush pluckings (spring and summer harvests), which account for some 80% of Darjeeling tea exports and garner the highest prices. These harvests are the ‘bread and butter’ of the Darjeeling tea industry.
Monsoon flush, however, which is of lower quality since the tea grows too quickly in the rains to develop the unique and complex flavor compounds formed in earlier harvests, is typically used in blends and sold domestically at lower prices. So, Goodricke decided they could risk some loss in this harvest to test out their efforts.
Plucking by hand during monsoon is the most dangerous for workers as the change of slipping or getting caught in a landslide is higher during this season than any other. So, most workers would want to avoid hand-plucking at this time anyway.
That said, Darjeeling Chineries (Camelia sinensis var. sinensis), which mostly comprises Margaret’s Hope, has such a small leaf size and, both due to the orientation of the plants and unevenness of the bushes, cannot really establish a plucking table suitable for passing a mechanical plucker over them without picking up chopped leaf or a stalky pluck.
A plucking table refers to the flat (or sometimes slightly domed) canopy surface of a pruned tea bush, maintained at a consistent, comfortable height for easy and efficient harvesting of new tea shoots.
Still, mechanization, is not a new concept. Rather, it has been talked about in Darjeeling for years. It just hasn’t been implemented at Goodricke until now. However, the consensus has been that mechanical plucking will impair the quality of the pluck – and thereby reduce the quality of the leave sent for processing, which will result in a decline in tea quality produced.
Goodricke’s General Manager of sales and marketing Binod Gurung contests this assertion.
“If we are to see the current trends…In the future, gardens will be requiring mechanization. But Margaret Hope and our company started machine plucking for two reasons: We wanted to break the myth that machine plucking will lead to bad quality of tea,” Gurung says. “Our company thought that before machine plucking is undertaken in a large scale, we would take this opportunity to experiment when we still have labor…not only to get ourselves ready for the future…but the most important thing is to prove to the world that machine plucked leaves can also give you excellent tea,” he adds.
“It's a myth," continues Gurung. "We have seen the quality of tea that has been produced in Margaret’s Hope. So, we are convinced that machine plucking, after it stabilizes after a few rounds, can give you excellent quality."
However, since first flush teas and especially white first flush teas are so delicate (they are not even machine-processed like normal orthodox tea, being hand sorted and hand-rolled), they must be plucked by hand. The plucking of the leaf is actually the first critical act in the process of making tea.
Darjeeling black tea is typically plucked to a standard of two leaves and a bud. This cannot be done mechanically without an even plucking table. Generally, first and second flush leaves have variations where they emerge from the bush. They don’t just spontaneously come out at the same height.
Gurung says that the plucking table is basically established after the first two to three rounds of mechanical plucking, which will likely produce stalky pickings. He clarifies, though, this is not a sacrifice of leaf in the first few rounds; rather, more labor hours post-plucking are required at the factory to sort and polish the leaf so that whatever has come through that is undesirable, is discarded, and one gets as close to two leaves and a bud as one can to hand-plucking.
Once an even table or “tipping he shoots at a predetermined height” as Gurung also refers to it, has been established by doing a few mechanized runs, the next batches of tea leaves grow at that even height. Then, the mechanical plucker can be run over the tea bushes at a predetermined height to obtain two leaves and a bud.
The machine they use is not automated. It is handheld and weights around 1.9 kgs with the battery. It can used by a single person who is properly trained on it.
Gurung says that instructions were clearly given for their trial run this past monsoon season, and the pluckers were well supervised.
Prashant Allay, the new garden manager at Margaret’s Hope for whom four-fifths of his career experience came from plains gardens where mechanical plucking has already been deployed, explains that training is key to the whole process.
“It's not that a person just goes and takes a machine and she starts doing an excellent job. The plucker needs to get used to handling of the machine, and if I'm putting a new trainer on a new trainee, we'll slow it down,” he says. “We are not interested in the area coverage, we are not interested in the leaf, which has been harvested; we’re focused on the training process. Once she's [the machine operator] used to that training, then it's quite simple because our bushes are quite small.”
He also mentions that China bush is quite a hardy plant.
“The leaf is smaller, and the top hamper is very solid,” Allay says. “Once your workers are used to that machine, and once they're used to the weight, then the machine just glides across the table, and it's quite simple.”
He says he assigned two people to each machine with the operators alternating after one got tired as the trainees are more used to hand-plucking and not holding a machine, however light it might be.
“If there are any twigs, which does come in with the harvester machine, they clean it up manually also,” Allay adds.
Gurung is careful to warn reporting that Margaret’s Hope has converted to mechanical plucking because only a small area of bush considered suitable for mechanical plucking had the machine applied to them. And, the two lines – machine plucked and hand plucked – were treated in a totally separate manner.
“Each batch is treated separately. In fact, the machine plucked teas are kept separately. It's given a different treatment, you know – it is sorted differently; it's evaluated by us separately and through a separate process. So, a lot of factors are there, but like I said, these are early, early years,” Gurung assures. “We are preparing for the future, so that's what I'm saying. We are basically trying to get ready on time, that's it.
Allay places it in further context by asserting that it's not solely machine plucking but rather “a combination of machine and hand.”
“There has to be a balance between how you use the machine and the hand,” Allay emphasizes. “The garden is in total control of the process, and there are times when hand is required instead of machine, and with that control and balance, we can keep quality high.”
Gurung claims that productivity roughly doubles when using the machine even taking into account post-plucking "clean-up."
For the monsoon flush, he claims the experiment was successful because the additional expense in added clean-up in the first few rounds was compensated by the amount of leaf plucked without sacrificing quality.
However, he says it would have been a different story had they tried in the month of May (when second flush starts).
“In May, the objective would be to make cleaner tables, remove the creep, remove the banjee (unusable) leaf, get ready for the second flush. Therefore, the productivity, the quantity of leaf will be very less,” Gurung assesses.
Allay says with each harvest, they will improve their capability of mechanical plucking and gradually, he anticipates that the area that will be machine plucked will increase.
“We did a post-plucking review to determine where we were doing it well and where we went wrong,” Allay says.
Gurung emphasizes that this will not be brought in during first flush and second flush. Moreover, the amount of leaf and the profile of leaf is such that it makes sense to hand-pluck. During rains flush, the amount of leaf gets very dense, and so more labor would normally be needed, which would be replaced by mechanical plucking.
First flush and second flush produce less, slower growing tea. The lower elevations flush before higher elevations. Hence, the pair mention that they won’t experience a labor problem during these phases for quite some time to come. Therefore, they don’t expect the machines to be brought into these highly valued and more complex harvests during the season.
Still, many are skeptical. Former Owner of Makaibari Estate and Founder of Rimpocha Tea Rajah Bannerjee is dead set against mechanization. “A crafted item needs committed devotion…Rare Darjeeling vintages are becoming a chimera when arbitrary plucking is resorted to," he says. "When one takes a certain section of the tea bush with any form of mechanized plucking, it’s the beginning of the death knell of the only world class agrarian Indian product."
Tea Tourism
Another innovation that the venerable Margaret’s Hope Garden is beginning to pursue is tea tourism. A few years back, they put in a tearoom and eatery near the entrance to the garden on Hill Cart Road in Kurseong. This has worked out very well in terms of popularizing Goodricke tea as tea from all gardens are brewed and served to customers as well as an ample menu.
This year, a heritage bungalow is in front of the garden where the Maharani of Cooch Behar (once said to have acquired a lease for Margaret’s Hope) had developed. The bungalow is called the Maharanee Bungalow, and features suite-type rooms with panoramic views of the tea garden, it being nestled inside the tea garden itself.
The experience it offers is one of a heritage colonial experience, though renovations to bathrooms and certain areas have made it more comfortable to guests. It has four suites. Meals are provided and prepared with local ingredients.
According to CEO Shaibal Dutt, the aim of the bungalow was to give people a true tea experience and bring guests back to the time of Margaret Cruikshank without compromising on comfort. He notes that other gardens like Makaibari have built modern five-star hotels managed by the Taj hospitality group (of Indian Hotels Ltd. owned by Tata Sons Ltd.). But people can stay at five-star hotels anywhere in the world. What makes Darjeeling special is the location, the history, and, of course, the tea.
“We actually, didn’t renovate the bungalow and open it up to the public to make money. We did it to bring people to the garden and to Margaret’s Deck where they can try a range of Goodricke Darjeeling teas,” Dutt says.
Also, by pricing it in a range that is not as high as the luxury hotels, Goodricke hopes to bring a broader array of guests to the estate. It’s basically a form of marketing for Goodricke and Margaret’s Hope.
What Margaret would have thought of mechanized plucking is anyone’s guess, but surely, she would have welcomed people to the estate to try the teas and experience the garden’s breathtaking beauty.
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