Tea grown in Scots’ back gardens sells for £200 per 100g at top store
POSH tea grown in Scotland is selling for £200 per 100g (3.5 ounces) at a top London department store.
Nine Ladies Dancing Tea is sold at the rare tea counter of Fortnum & Mason and is also served in the Royal Penthouse Suite at the Corinthia Hotel in London, which takes tea very seriously.
The nine female tea enthusiasts who formed a collective to grow it do so in their back gardens in Scotland, where it is hand-picked before being processed.
They had their first cooriginated tea picking of 2021 on July 5, and make all their decisions based on consensus, even visiting Sri Lanka to pick up more tips.
Keen gardener Susie WalkerMunro learned tea was being grown in Cornwall and tried her hand at it in Kinnettles, Angus, germinating tea seeds from both Nepal and Georgia.
After trialling tea growing herself for a number of years, Ms Walker-Munro then put the word out to friends to see if they wanted to try, and the Tea Gardens of Scotland group was formed in 2016.
As a result, the nine banded together with the aim of becoming tea planters, transforming their gardens, or farmland into micro tea plantations.
Jane Spencer-Nairn planted around 2,000 tea bushes in part of her walled garden in Fife, which was formerly a nursery, and before lockdown hosted visitors from Japan and China, something she hopes to continue.
She said: “If you really know about teas you can tell instantly in the same way that if you are a wine buff, whether it is South African Pinot or Australian Shiraz.”
Unusually, the tea is grown from seed – rather than cuttings which is the more common approach.
The seeds were grown in tall plastic sleeves. Around 40,000 of them were hand-stuffed with a sand and ericaceous soil mixture – which then had to be planted.
The carefully packaged tea leaves from each individual garden were sent for processing at the Scottish Tea Factory, after being plucked last week.
If you really know about teas you can tell instantly. Nine Ladies Dancing Tea collective member Jane Spencer-Nairn.