Like many on New Year’s morning 2015, Jo Harper, a nurse who was living in Devon in the South of England, sat up in his bed and took stock of his life. As multitudes of slightly hung-over compatriots made paper-thin resolutions, elsewhere in the UK, Harper decided to act on something that he’d been talking about for quite some time to his nurse wife, Kathryn: cultivation of fine, whole leaf tea.
He finally decided to just go for it. "The incredible modern world means that you could be sitting in your bed with a cup of tea in one hand, a smartphone in the other, and then you can purchase things from anywhere,” explains Harper.
So, with a click of an icon on his smartphone, he purchased a thousand seeds of Camellia sinensis from China in an online auction and took his first step on an adventure that would consume him for nearly a decade; it continues to dominate his life even today.
The seeds arrived as stipulated on the website, and it created a problem for Jo. “What in God’s name am I going to do now?” he thought. Despite his fervor for the plant, Harper had never actually cultivated tea in his life.
He was not exactly certain about the viability of the terrain on his farmland for tea. While the area in which he lives and cultivates tea is part of Dartmoor National Park in a place called Devon (formerly Devonshire) located in Southwest England about twenty miles from Exeter and Plymouth, one wouldn’t normally think of it as an environment where tea would flourish.
Although part of an upland area, Dartmoor is far from being considered high altitude where the seed acquired by Harper typically thrives. That said, the moor gets more rainfall than surrounding lowlands, and this is absorbed quickly by the accumulated peat in the parklands and distributed gradually throughout lower lying land. Hence, it is a fertile expanse in which various crops can be grown. Indeed, the Harpers’ neighbor runs a farm.
While many would not consider Harper’s decision to grow tea on his land to be a rational one, it is not entirely devoid of reason. The terroir is just acidic enough to grow the tea, being composed of heathland and granite rock. While the area does not get enough rainfall naturally for tea to thrive, the past few years have been wetter than usual, according to Jo.
Jo’s purpose was not so much to develop a profitable business at this point, but to assess the feasibility of the project – and, once in progress, add to the knowledge of cultivation in his region of the UK. His efforts constituted, essentially, a rather ambitious and unlikely experiment.
Unfortunately, the early results were not promising: Only thirty plants emerged from the thousand seeds that were planted. So, at 3 percent growth, he had to admit to himself that his first trial was a failure and ask himself whether to continue it. Undeterred, the following year, he decided to go about it in a different way, sourcing plants from other places in the UK, including ornamental tea bushes. He used cuttings and ultimately relied upon Nepali and Georgian-sourced seeds as his cultivation base.
Taking a developmental approach involving trial and error was arduous and took years of planting and study before Harper and his wife could achieve what could be considered a viable harvest.
“The first five years were really about just trying to establish growing patterns and understanding how to do it. And then everything [was] very, very slow the way we were doing it because we weren't doing it the conventional way. But as soon as we started to get regular irrigation in and we started to learn from our mistakes, then things started to happen, and plants started to live. In the process, we decided it was important for us to begin understanding tea and what it is,” Harper says.
The Harpers’ tea education involved travelling to India and Nepal as well as a tea plantation in Rwanda to learn about cultivation and processing of orthodox leaf. Although the learning curve was steep, in five years, Harper’s initial experiment with a thousand Chinese seeds had blossomed into ten thousand viable bushes.
“We've got 1000 plants from unknown sources because I wasn't keeping notes – I was just gathering material from wherever I could – but we have about 10,000 tea plants largely of Nepalese or Georgian origin – and, surprisingly, we've learnt to make very good tea,” he says with a smile.
Harper and his wife Kathryn, as well as some occasional volunteers and paid helpers, provide the labor for the garden by plucking the tea. Initially, their tea was solely hand-rolled. However, in the intervening years, a rolling machine was bought for larger batches. Due to the cost of labor, some processing batches remain small.
“If we've just picked a couple of kilos a day in our harvest, and we're making just a small batch, then that will be just hand rolled,” he says, adding: “If not, if it's over 3-4 kilos, we'll use the machine, and I might finish it by hand just to get the final feel of it.”
The Harpers use an oven for drying and woks for making pan roasted green tea. They make several varieties of black and green tea, and more recently, a yellow tea, which was produced somewhat by accident.
“The green tea that I was trying to make in one batch actually overheated…and started to produce a lactic acid and do this anaerobic sort of fermentation. But it ended up producing a really, really wonderful yellow tea, and it sold out super-fast.”
Unlike large commercial gardens in places like Darjeeling where there are distinct harvests called “flushes,” due to the limited availability and cost of labor, plucking is more continuous and proceeds throughout the cultivation season. "I think that actually does affect the flavor because it gives us a very good flavor, but it means our yield is very low," says Harper.
Although he also plucks, Harper is solidly at the helm on the processing side of the business. He says he feels a sense of responsibility to his wife and the small team of pluckers that have gravitated to the estate simply because of their enthusiasm for tea. As a result, he is focused on producing a very high-quality tea rather than on yield.
The experimental nature of the production project at Dartmoor Tea Estate and Harper’s heavy emphasis on quality has resulted in losses for the estate in the past. Fortunately, for the Harpers, they own the land, having bought the fourteen acres of “derelict” farmland containing several buildings (eight in pastureland and six in woodland) in 2011. Hence, the couple has not had to go into debt to finance the project. Rather, they have managed to meet Dartmoor Tea Estate’s expenditures from their joint savings.
“In a way, we've become peasant farmers and we've dedicated ourselves to this,” Harper proclaims.
Having achieved the desired quality, he is presently focusing on the business side. He hopes that within the next five years he’ll be able to build the necessary business model into the business, which will make it sustainable. He is confident that enough people are passionate about tea to grow both his customer base and the tourism aspect of the business.
The Harpers have developed a solid following with the UK’s East Asian community, whose tea-drinking habits differ from that of classical British tea drinkers (i.e., they do not add milk and sugar like the Brits have traditionally done). Additionally, according to Harper, they have been cultivating a growing flock of fans amongst young people in general, who similarly do not echo the consumption pattern of earlier generations in the UK.
“We're noticing that, actually, when we go to London and visit, that the fine specialty tea drinkers are younger than me," says Harper, who notes the biggest group seems to be in their 20s and 30s. "It's slowly building. I think the picture will look different in another ten, fifteen, twenty years’ time,” says Harper.
The tourism side has also proven to be unexpectedly promising as it show signs of boosting tourism in places like Wales and Scotland.
“People will come and visit the plantation…from the from all over the UK and abroad," he says. "These are things that I didn't expect when we started to grow some tea seeds because I didn't realize that the passion for tea was out there amongst people.”
It’s the steady enthusiasm for tea that’s really what is driving tea-producers like the Harpers. What they are also finding quite remarkable is how culturally unifying the plant has been for enthusiasts in an age, post Brexit, when immigrants are viewed with suspicion and Britons are struggling with the definition of what it means to be ‘British’.
“It's been interesting from a cultural heritage point of view because we get a lot of people from India who are British, who are living and working in Britain, who want to bring their family," says Harper, who notes many are Indian, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Japanese. "They want to show something of their own culture even though it's not necessarily the same method that they would use."
On the other hand, he recounts that when locals who’ve lived in the area for generations come to visit the estate, they experience a bit of a culture shock in being served tea without milk and sugar. So, the Harpers end up doing a lot of tea-educating, presenting tea consumption according to different styles, such as Gong Fu and something they call “semi-western.”
Harper is proud of having achieved something unlikely alongside the work they are doing in tea education and quality as well as on fair trade practices and emphasis on purchasing organically and biodynamically cultivated tea. Recognizing that most of the public at large can’t afford to drink their tea or other fine locally produced tea exclusively, but given the high demand for tea in Britain, he contends that by influencing the choices the consumer makes, he can encourage them to make a positive impact on the workers and the environment at places to which they will never physically go. As a cultivator and a naturalist, he takes tea education very seriously.
“There are some really good things that people can do, and they only need to spend a few pence more on their packets of tea to make a big difference in the right places, in my view,” says Harper.
The Harpers and their estate stand as a prime example of just how powerful a passion for tea can be. Jo describes himself as obsessed with tea, the plant having influenced so much of his daily life and thoughts since the tea garden was established.
“There's a magic that happens,” he says talking about how tea has influenced the Harpers’ lives. Whether from England to India to Taiwan to Kenya or Japan, it’s a feeling that tea-growers share worldwide, and it binds them together.