Produced by steam distillation of the fruits of the plant Ellettarria cardamomum.

Cardamom, popularly called the “Queen” of spices and is the dried fruit of Ellettaria cardamom. This is a medium sized perennial herbaceous plant indigenous to Sri Lanka. Also this is a plant with a thick irregular shaped rhizomes belonging to the Zingiberacea familly. The plant produces a large number of leafy vegetative stems, which grow to about 3 meters in height with numerous alternative leaves having large spear like laminas and sheathing bases. The inflorescence is a panicle, which arises from the rhizome. The flowers arise in-groups of two or three. The mature fruit is a light green to yellow ovoid capsule roughly triangular in shape with a beaked tip. It opens in to pepery valves to reveal the angular wrinkled seeds. Cardamom requires a cool climate and as such can be successfully cultivated only at elevation over 600 m. The mature fruits, which are really pods, are hands picked and dried in barnsby means of a regulated hot air supply. Only in this manner is the widely demanded Lanka Green (LG) and Lanka Light Green (LLG) are produced. These are the quality materials that are used in the distillation that produce H.D.DE SILVA’S Oil of Cardamom with the spicy odour so truly representative of the natural spice it self.