Charles T. Scowen produced some of the finest examples of early commercial photography in Ceylon (now known as Sri Lanka). English by birth, Scowen arrived in Ceylon in early 1873 and opened a photographic studio in 1876. Flower and plant studies of exceptional quality, such as Liberian Coffee Blossom, were a specialty of his studio. Under British colonial rule, coffee had become a highly profitable cash crop by the 1860s, but by the time Scowen would have taken this photograph, a fungus had laid to waste the majority of Ceylon coffee plantations.