Richard Ross
speaker
110 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 23 Jul
Richard Ross’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
So by being in contact with Paolo, he was able to say, oh, well, if you bought it in 2015, then I know that those plants were ones that probably came from my own plantation.
And then the later ones, once he'd established that...
There was clearly a market for tea plants in these cooler climates in Britain.
He started to go out and look for better plant material that would be even better suited to the colder conditions of Scotland.
And he'd gone to Turkey and had sourced some seeds from Turkey.
The Turkish tea growing area can be really cold in the winter.
You can get snow, a lot of low fog and high rainfall.
Much more like Scotland, yeah.
Exactly.
Yes.
And this was the same with how he described his past as well.
The more you heard the story, the more you realised that the different stories never quite added up.
Science Weekly · Revisited: A Scottish tea mystery, episode one – green shoots · 21 Jul 2026
podcast
I started to hear publicity about this guy who was growing tea and selling plants in Scotland.
And the more I read about it, I realised that he was just down the road from a piece of land my family owns that I was thinking about trying to do something with.
My grandfather, who I never knew, was a tea planter in Sri Lanka.
So my mother had been born on this tea plantation and I'd grown up with all these stories about the romance of beautiful tea plantations and lush gardens and tasting tea on the balcony and that sort of thing.
So, he arranged to meet Tam.
and this would have been in the very end of 2014, sat in one of the steadings in his farm with a roaring fire going and him looking, to all intents and purposes, like this sort of country gent sitting there with his tweed jacket on and telling me all the economics about the possibility of growing tea in Scotland and the sort of returns we could expect to get.
He came across as quite a kind of jovial character who was interested in other people and quite affable.
Very easy chat.
Showing 41–60 of 110 · page 3 of 6
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