More and more people are planting tea in unusual places, not necessarily for commercial gain but out of a passionate fascination with tea, a desire to meet the challenge of encouraging baby plants to grow in what may seem to be impossible climates and an interest in creating tea gardens that tea lovers can visit - both to enjoy the visual beauty of the plants and to learn how different varietals grows, how a tea bush looks as the new flush starts to grow and how the leaves are plucked and processed.

Those who travel regularly to tea estates in India, Sri Lanka, China, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, etc. always tell tea novices how breathtakingly beautiful these places are and they encourage others to visit. But that is more easily said than done and in the past, new tea lovers who yearn to stroll the paths that weave between the undulating fields of green, who long to snap off handfuls of tender new leaf shoots for themselves, have had to simply make do with photographs and brief clips of film.

But today tea gardens are being established closer to home. For Americans on the East coast, South Carolina’s Charleston Tea Plantation provides an ideal opportunity to watch tea processing first hand; for Italians, the tiny Tuscan tea garden at Sant-Andrea di Compito allows visitors the chance to drink locally-made tea; for British tea lovers, Tregothnan Estate in Cornwall is gradually increasing the number of tea plants in the ground.

The concern for all new growers in untried locations is to find varietals that are best suited to the particular climate and weather patterns that will thrive in the local soil and will be suitable to the manufacture of different types of tea. It’s hard to know how the plants will fare until they are actually in the ground and start to adapt to their individual conditions. As has been discussed in previous articles about Hawaii and New Zealand, all new tea growers learn by trial and error.

The Tregothnan Tea Estate near Truro in Cornwall in the southwest of the UK was established in 1997 and now has 21 acres under tea with an estimated 1,000 plants per acre. Since Jonathon Jones, garden director, has collected tea plants from many different locations around the world, the plants are a mixture of mostly unidentified varietals. 

“They do seem to be predominantly sinensis but only DNA testing would prove exactly what they are. We have been selecting the varietals that thrive best here and propagating them in the tea nursery,” Jones told Tea & Coffee Asia.

There is little to disturb the growth of the plants at the 14th century family estate. No pests have yet interfered with the health of the bushes although a sooty mould has been found on baby plants in the nursery – but this is nothing serious. Pheasants are perhaps the only predator since they seem to love the taste of the young leaf shoots. However, the weather presents a serious challenge each winter, with severe frosts and temperatures dropping to minus 5º or 6ºC, but the lack of wind-chill, which camellias hate, means that even the assamica cultivars somehow survive the sharpest of mid-winter cold snaps.

Jonathon Jones has plans to recreate tea history at Tregothnan by having a replica made of the only surviving Wardian case in the world. Invented by Dr. Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward in the 1820s for the transportation of plants, Wardian cases were used by Robert Fortune to smuggle 20,000 tea plants from China to Assam. Tregothnan’s antique case was used to bring rare plants to the family garden during the Victorian period and the estate team is very proud of this remarkable piece of horticultural history.

At Monte Verità in Ticino, Switzerland, tea growing was never intended to be a commercial venture but was created to allow visitors to understand both tea cultivation and tea culture. The small tea garden was laid out in 2004 by Peter Oppliger, a specialist in medicinal plants who first developed an interest in tea bushes while travelling in India. His first experiments with tea were carried out at the nearby Brissago Islands in Lake Maggiore where the sub-tropical climate helped the new seedlings to thrive. From there he was invited to establish a small tea garden at The Center for Tea Culture 300 metres above sea level on the gentle slopes of Monte Verità. 

The Center is designed as a place of peace and meditation, its activities, ambience and philosophy based upon ideals of harmony, respect, purity and peace. It is a place for study and research, seminars and special events, exhibitions and Japanese tea ceremonies. The sentiore del te (The Tea Way) is a path that leads visitors through the tea garden – where 1,500 plants now thrive - allowing them to clear their minds of the preoccupations of the material world before arriving at the Japanese Tea Pavilion. This quiet place of contemplation is the waiting room for guests who then enter the Loreley Tea House for a performance of the tea ceremony which is performed by a Japanese Tea Master every Tuesday in summer and every first and third Saturday in winter.

The first harvest of Ticino tea was plucked and processed in 2005 and today three crops are gathered each year, in spring, summer, and autumn. The spring flush is the main crop and Japanese specialist tea makers arrive each year in May to pluck approximately 5 kg of fresh green leaf and hand-process it into Japanese sencha and gyokuro green tea. The steaming, hand-rolling and drying of the leaf takes three and a half hours and produces just 500 precious grams of dry leaf. It is only drunk at Monte Verita and plays a part in creating a sense of well-being and calm at the Center. “Green tea is the tea of our time,” Peter Oppliger says. “It helps against almost every kind of illness caused by civilization. Drinking five to seven cups of it a day means treating yourself well.”

At their berry farm in Skagit Valley, Washington state, Richard and Steve Sakuma are also producing small quantities of tea. They were encouraged to add camellia sinensis to the other crops they grow by John Vandeland, a former director of diversified agriculture for Lipton who selected baby plants for the Sakuma brothers that he thought would withstand the area’s low winter temperatures of just 1º - 4ºC. The soil is a sandy or clay loam that is slightly acidic and the addition of compost before planting would have been beneficial. Five acres were planted out with a selection of different varietals more than 10 years ago and three or four did not manage to withstand the extreme cold. The others thrived and the first harvest was gathered in 2007.

In the early days, the brothers experimented with a gasoline-fuelled hedge-trimmer style harvester, a meat grinder to roll the leaves and a wok for firing and drying, but found little time in their busy schedule of fruit production to focus on their tea operation. However, with a growing interest in specialty teas and the positive health message that accompanies the beverage these days, they decided to focus on the possibilities of the tea crop. So essential equipment for panning, rolling and drying was purchased from Taiwan and Richard Sakuma headed there to visit tea farms and research stations in order to learn about processing and how to make the best use of the new machinery. 

But since then, a series of very cold winters, pest damage and a fungal disease have taken their toll and this year, the farm is down from the original 20,000 plants to just 5,000. Richard Sakuma is disheartened. 

“Just as I was beginning to make progress with processing methods for our tea, production has taken a blow,” he told us. “I have about 4,000 new cuttings that are available to plant this spring. These were intended to increase our plantings but now they are more of a replacement for plants that have not survived this winter.” 

The tea harvesting season runs from June, when the new tea shoots reach two leaves and a bud stage, until mid-September and a dozen or farm employees pick strawberries, blueberries, tayberries and boysenberries in the morning and hand-pick tea in the afternoon. For two years, the Sakumas have been making white, oolong and green tea and last season produced about 140 pounds (63.64 kg). The teas are sold at the Sakuma farm stands to local residents and visiting tourists, and a few pounds go the Herbfarm Restarant near Seattle. 

But, says Richard Sakuma, “The future of creating a viable tea plantation in the area is less certain but I still have hope. There is a lot of interest and hope for the future in tea here on our farm but it is still an R&D project.” 

When asked what his advice was to other new tea growers, he said, “Be patient, diligent, clear on your vision and goals. Understand the scope of what success is to you within the tea industry. Depending on your background the learning curve can be quite broad.”

Roy Fong has been running a very successful tea retail business in San Francisco since 1993, specializing in high quality Chinese and Taiwanese tea. So why did he suddenly decide to start growing tea in California? 

“I’ve always wanted to show people the true versatility of tea from the onset,” he told us. “I’ve been contracting with farmers in China since 1993 but it isn’t the same unless you actually get your hands dirty! I have been looking for just the right spot for over five years, due to the economic down turn, I was able to find the perfect spot and was able to afford it.” 

But why California? 

“I live here for one thing, but also, the soil in California is fertile and can grow almost anything,” Fong said. “And California is one of the biggest camellia growing regions, so how fitting is it to grow tea!”

Roy is currently preparing 23 acres for the new cuttings – at a location in the Bay area just over an hour outside San Francisco. He has added compost to the land and is growing almonds on 10 acres and grass on the rest in order to break down the soil and increase organic matter. So far no tea plants are yet in the ground but some 150 seedlings (from Hawaii, China and Taiwan, with more arriving soon from India) are being nurtured in Roy’s greenhouse. He plans to plant out about 500 baby bushes next spring and, once the first batch is established in the tea garden, he will continue to raise new seedlings in the greenhouse. He has four different oolong varietals so far but plans to bring in others in order to run trials to work out which thrive best and produce the best teas. Roy has a small team looking after the plants and expects to hire a few experienced people from China once the bushes are sturdy enough to be harvested.

Roy’s long-term plan is to produce different types of tea but expects to be able to make good oolongs from the hardier oolong varietals. His main challenge will be the weather since California’s summer is hot and dry, whereas in Asia where the plants normally thrive, summer air is much more humid. “We have paid a lot of attention to irrigation and solar netting in order to protect the plants from excessive heat.”

And what about the future? 

“I hope that eventually, this will be a learning center where people learn about every aspect of tea cultivation from the soil up - soil management, plant husbandry from cutting or seedlings to adult plants, harvesting, and production,” Fong said. “I am not worried about the future. Whatever happens will take care of itself.” 

He is also planning to build a teahouse and a Chinese culture center at the tea garden.

Like Roy Fong, Brendan Waye does not yet have any tea plants in the ground but he’s hoping that later this year, in the fall, he will be planting about 500 saplings in a sunny ravine on Salt Spring Island, one of the small islands that lies between the Canadian mainland and larger Vancouver Island. 

While looking around for the right place to grow tea on Vancouver Island on a more permanent basis, Brendan plans to start growing the seedlings on a friend’s property. The ravine that he’s selected has natural forest trees that will provide shade and help retain moisture in the soil. Some logging took place here more than 100 years ago and nothing else has ever been cultivated. The soil is 100% organic and was mulched last summer to prepare it for the baby tea plants. But, as he explains, “Right now my precious little camellia bushes are doing well under artificial light in my basement and are being fed a by rich organic soil teeming with effective micro-organisms”.

To prepare himself for this new venture, last fall, Brendan took a three month organic master gardener’s course at Gaia College on Vancouver Island. 

“It was such a huge eye opener, and has forever changed the way I look at growing food and how important healthy soil is to the success of any garden,” Waye said. “I can see the results in how fast the tea bushes are maturing. When the tea seeds arrived, I was told that approximately one in 10 would sprout. The rest would never grow. As it stands now, with my new found knowledge applied to these seeds propagation, my success rate is about 8 out of 10. I could not be more delighted.”

The plants have been grown from 500 seeds purchased from an estate in Upper Assam and are from a vegetative clone assamica cultivar called P-126, “developed over 20 years and now considered one of the best for producing a rich, malty and extremely tasty cup of classic black Assam tea.” 

It is supposedly quite hardy, can withstand bouts of frost and drought and under ideal conditions can produce a decent cup of tea 5-7 years after planting. Brendan enlisted the help of several tea garden owners to determine which cultivar would be suited for the Vancouver terroir and the cooler, damp west coast winters.

What has inspired him to try growing tea in Canada? He says it is a natural progression from a passionate interest in growing his own food, his inherent green thumb and his love of the tea business that he’s been immersed in for more than a decade. He would also like to think that growers in the west will eventually be able to produce excellent quality teas that may replace some of the oriental teas we currently rely on. 

“At some point in the not too distant future, exquisite teas produced in the Far East may not be available to us over here, unless we are willing to shell out hundreds of dollars for it.,” Waye believes. “Increased domestic demand for better teas as a result of higher level of affluence among the people of China and India, and skyrocketing oil prices will dramatically increase production and supply chain costs. This two-fold hit to our imported tea will enable growers here in the western world to produce the leaf at a similar price or possibly less than we would pay to have it shipped from the traditional producing countries.”

But will tea grow happily in British Coumbia? Brendan reckons that the region’s moist, mountainous, temperate climate will suit the tea plant, and says that while the rest of Canada is gripped by freezing temperatures each winter, Vancouver and its islands remains warm enough to be known as Canada’s ‘banana belt’. And since the warm air that currently touches the southern tip of Vancouver Island is expected to gradually move further north as a result of global warming, he is optimistic about conditions becoming even more favorable. However, he has no illusions that small tea gardens in his part of the world will produce enough to replace the quantity currently imported, “even within the next 20 years, but the reality is, we have to start somewhere, and now is as good a time as any.” 

It will simply be a matter of time before it becomes clear if the plants can do as well as expected here. The only predator will probably be the local deer that eat the fresh shoots of almost any plant in the harsher winter months. But Brendan expects “a fair share of mites, grubs and aphids but the key is to keep the little bushes extremely healthy by keeping the soil thriving with micro-organisms.” If the plants do flourish, the plan is to make green teas since they require the least amount of manufacturing equipment and can be made by hand by skilled tea makers. The short-term ambition is to establish micro-gardens where local farmers, gardeners and hobbyists grow tea on a few acres of unused fertile land. The long-term dream is to establish vast tea gardens that will “dot the west coast of Canada, but it certainly will not happen in my lifetime. Perhaps in 50-75 years – maybe!”