Christine Parks - Grow Your Own Tea: The Complete Guide to Cultivating, Harvesting, and Preparing

Fragrant osmanthus flowers are a traditional way to scent some teas.

Grow
Your Own
Tea

The Complete Guide To
Cultivating, Harvesting,
andPreparing

Christine Parks and
Susan M. Walcott

This Camellia Forest tea with flowers is ready to infuse.

The idea for this book came to us on a beautiful sunny summer day in Oregon. Susan and I were on a trip to Minto Island Tea Company, driving through the flat agricultural land of the Willamette Valley to visit their gardens. While sharing our excitement over the growing number of farmers across the United States making homegrown tea, we envisioned writing a short guide for tea lovers and gardeners, to document this living history as it unfolds and encourage local tea tourism. Most people have no idea that tea can grow, has been grown, and is currently being grown in North America, the British Isles, and other locations outside Asia. Many people are surprised to learn that the tea plant is a kind of camellia and can be grown wherever ornamental camellias grow. Furthermore, despite a bounty of information available to members of the global tea industry about how to grow and make tea on a commercial scale, limited resources have been available to guide new and small-scale tea growers. As Susan and I arrived at our destination and met with Elizabeth Miller at Minto, we enthusiastically agreed that more people should know about homegrown tea.

My own family has grown tea for decades, as one of the hundreds of types of camellias in our North Carolina collection at Camellia Forest. We made tea to drink, following a simple recipe for sun drying. In the early 2000s, after visiting Hangzhou, home of the famous Dragon Well (or Longjing) tea, the China National Tea Museum, and amazing tea gardens, I became seriously hooked on tea and dove headfirst into studying and cultivating it. Humbled by its deep history around the world, I soon realized I could spend the rest of my life learning about tea and never run out of questions.

My husband, David, and I planted a species and test garden with hundreds of tea plants on a hillside near our home. We sought out and consulted other small tea farms across the United States, sharing practical experiences and lessons learned through avid research. When I attended the Atlanta World Tea Expo in 2007, I felt like quite the anomalya US tea grower. As I walked through the crowds, I was stunned by the diversity and enthusiasm of vendors and tea fanciers. Since then, my passion for all things tea has deepened. I became a leader in tea at the American Camellia Society, holding tea education seminars and workshops and taking every opportunity to introduce people to the possibilities of homegrown, handmade tea.

Susans journey with US-grown tea began at a grocery store in Indiana, where she was intrigued by the eye-catching label for American Classic tea, produced by Charleston Tea Plantation. Her first academic job at Atlantas Georgia State University was close enough to Wadmalaw Island, where the tea is produced, that she was able to visit and tour the plantation. She was even lucky enough to buy a tree descended from Liptons earliest US tea endeavors in the 1880s.

A geographer whose curiosity about origins led to an exploration of the many worlds of tea, Susan has traveled extensively for research. She too visited Hangzhou, where she tried Dragon Well tea and high-mountain strains. She also sampled a variety grown in the jungle that is pressed into cakes for export to Tibet where its served with salt and a dollop of yak butter. She has visited tea gardens across Hawaii and traced Liptons search for suitable US tea-growing sites as an alternative to those in China during the turbulent Cultural Revolution of the mid-1960s and 1970s. Happily, Susan also came to work at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, where the small world of local tea brought us together.

This tale of tea aficionados is not unusual, among a community of friendly, enthusiastic growers. Many home gardeners grow tea for its health benefits, for the simple pleasures of gardening, and for the satisfaction of creating a fresh, handcrafted brew. Tea is generally a passion firstone that sometimes grows into a business. In recent years, Camellia Forests tea garden has more than tripled in size. We now make more than enough tea to drink and share with friends and customers, which is my greatest reward.