CORNISH GOLD

Joanna Weinberg, Teals

Cornwall is famous for many things – of course, for its great golden beaches and craggy, dramatic coastline. For its pasties and cream teas, its romanticised history of smugglers and its indomitably independent spirit. It’s fun for us, at the gateway to the West Country, to be able to showcase some of the best Cornish food and drink projects.

One such project is particularly magical and stems from the county’s plantlife. With its exotic gardens of palm trees, endless hydrangeas and gigantic, echiums, Cornwall’s flora is so noticeably different from that around us that it can feel like the separate country that many Cornish would prefer it to be. Follow the Fal estuary 6 miles upriver from its mouth in Truro, into the depths of the huge Tregothnan estate and you will find, growing along 100 acres of its banks, perhaps the most unexpected Cornish plant of all – tea.

‘A soggy British summer is perfect for tea growing,’ says Greg Springer, commercial director of Tregathnon tea, cheerfully. Its very specific microclimate created by the 18-metre-deep creek that runs through the tea growing area keeps it both mild in the winter (it never freezes) and cool in the summer (it can be 5 degrees cooler than the nearest town). The climate there is very close to that of Darjeeling. ‘In fact,’ he goes on, ‘we have a longer picking season here – we often flower a couple of weeks before the tea in Darjeeling.’

I find it easy to forget, when I sit down for one of my 7 daily cuppas (the average number of cups of tea drunk by us Brits) that tea is a plant, not just a drink. It’s closely related to the camellia, the winter flowering, shiny dark-leaved shrub that is the first to flower of the year in many front gardens around the country.

The Tregathnon estate has a long history in rare botanicals. From the days of Captain Cook, who sailed the globe with botanists, recording and bringing back specimens from all over the world, Tregathnon became home to many special plant specimens. When the Royal Gardens in Kew received one, another often went quietly to Tregathnon. Today, still, the estate is famous for its camellias, as well as its collection of rare roses. Some, such as Fortunes Double Yellow, are the only example in the Western hemisphere, along with trees thought to be extinct such as the Wollemi Pine, and some of the largest known rhodedendrons in the world.

To grow tea takes an act of both imagination and stamina. This is the leap that Lord and Lady Falmouth, owners of the estate, made twenty years ago when they were seeking a commercial crop to support the gardens. They risked 100 acres to test whether the climate would succeed with tea in the same way it had with camellias. It took time – a long time – to learn how to do it.

Jonathan Jones OBE, then the estate’s head gardener and now managing director of the tea business, travelled on a Nuffield scholarship around the great tea areas of the world to bring back both knowledge and specimens. And then it was a waiting game. ‘First, there’s the soil preparation, which can be somewhere between 4 and 10 years, depending on the state of the soil,’ says Springer. Most of the area will have been farmed previously for another crop, perhaps with unwanted fertilisers, or overploughed. ‘It must be left fallow for a year, followed by several years of sacrificial crops, such as buckwheat or chamomile, either to harvest, or plough back in, to take care of leeched chemicals from previous land use, or to fix nitrogen back into the soil,’ he continues.

The tea bushes are planted out at 18 months old, when they are still a tiny 12-14 inches tall, in rows, more akin to a vineyard than the traditional, densely packed style we associate with tea growing. The plants are still so delicate at that age, you can easily lose a whole row of them to the weather, or even injudicious weeding or mowing. You then have 6-7 years of biding your time, managing the tea bushes as they slowly group, shaping them to a degree so that they are 3-4 feet tall and about the same width as a classic box hedge. We are now 8-10 years into their life: this is when you can start to harvest from them. Every year the amount you can harvest grows, taking just the young tips and leaving the maintenance leaves. If you weren’t harvesting, a tea bush would turn into a fully-grown tree, reaching heights of 30-40 feet. ‘The process of tea growing is in many ways more similar to the Japanese art of bonsai than it is to farming. By carefully nipping away at where the tea is growing, you hugely prolong the life of the plant. A single tea bush can, if carefully managed, be economically viable for 500 years,’ says Springer. Since the estate grows to organic standards, the positive environmental impact of this is extraordinary – the soil is undisrupted, the possibility of carbon sequestering is great and no chemicals enter the environment. teals.co.uk tregothnan.co.uk

After the tea leaves are picked, they are left to wither for a few hours, which allows them to soften. They are then rolled in a big rolling press to break them down and rupture the cell membranes to expose them to the air and enable oxidation. From a flavour and colour perspective, this period is the most important of all. Depending on the weather and season, that part can take anything from a few hours to a few days. It is left until it is ‘just right’ and that is where skill and experience come in. Finally, the leaves are dried with hot air before packing. If sealed correctly, tea will keep for hundreds of years without losing its flavour. The only reason it has a ‘best before’ date is because that’s required by law.

To really taste the tea, try the Single Estate which is 100% derived from Tregothnan. Like Darjeeling, it is delicate, light, and best drunk black - perfect for afternoon tea. ‘For a perfect brew, allow boiled water to cool for a couple of minutes (to 88 degrees to be precise), then infuse it twice. The first short infusion (30-40 seconds) effectively ‘washes’ the tea, with the second longer infusion (3-4 minutes) allowing for a golden colour and truly rounded and unique taste,’ says Springer.

Now, Tregothnan is comfortably the largest tea growing area in Europe and within a couple of years it will be the largest in the West, currently harvesting half to three quarters of a million cups’ worth of pure English tea (two and a half million cups of blended). Once the total area is planted this will scale up to 10 million. Does that sound as miraculous to you as it does to me? Time for a cuppa I think.