Beverley Clare Wainwright

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17 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 21 Jul

Beverley Clare Wainwright’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Science Weekly · Revisited: A Scottish tea mystery, episode one – green shoots · 21 Jul 2026 podcast

What we're finding in Scotland, it's taking eight years, maybe ten years before the plants mature, if they survive.

The quantity of plants you need in order to produce any kind of a crop is quite substantial.

So, for example, some of the growers in Scotland with one and a half thousand plants that are seven years old producing as little as one kilo of tea per year.

So let me tell you what tea requires to grow.

Soil pH 4.5 to 5.5, so it's quite acidic.

It requires 1,500 millimetres of rain for a year.

Here in Perthshire, we only have 800 millimetres per year.

So even in Scotland, it generally needs to be irrigated.

And the other big thing, tea is quite an unusual plant.

It takes oxygen up through the root.

And so the soil that they're in has to be free-flowing.

So they constantly need water to keep them alive.

But you can't sit them in a tub of water because they will literally drown and die.

In many cases, people lose more than 50% of their plants in the effort of trying to grow them.

You know, it's very interesting, making tea, growing tea.

People get hooked into tea and, you know, it's quite obsessive.

There's a huge amount of romance behind it.

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