Kiambethu Tea Farm

Arnold Butler McDonell bought 350 acres in the Limuru highlands from the British government in 1904, and spent over a decade watching coffee, corn and flax all fail at the farm's 7,200-foot altitude. In 1918, a friend visiting from India brought him a gift of a few Camellia sinensis assamica seedlings; McDonell planted twenty acres on a whim, and in 1926 sold his first harvest to the Mabroukie tea factory — the sale credited as the start of commercial tea production in Kenya.

Five generations of McDonell's family have lived on the land since, and the farm is now run by his granddaughter, Fiona Vernon, alongside her husband Marcus. Visitors touring Thursday through Sunday walk through the original gardens and surrounding indigenous forest, home to colobus monkeys, before a guided tea tasting and a farm-style lunch served at the family's own home — a working farm and family residence opened to visitors rather than a built-for-tourism estate.

Where much of Kenya's tea trade runs through large estates supplying export markets in bulk, Kiambethu is still the same smallholding McDonell turned to tea out of desperation after a decade of crop failures — and still in the hands of the family that made that gamble pay off a century ago.