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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

Yeah, he seemed like somebody I could do business with.

And it just seemed a very exciting prospect to be part of this potentially new industry in Scotland.

And so I agreed fairly quickly to buy 500 tea plants from him.

I was in Perthshire, which is pretty much bang in the middle of Scotland.

We had one grower from Orkney.

We had another from Aberdeenshire on the east.

And we had a couple of other growers right down in the southwest.

So really all four points of the compass in Scotland.

He said that he had a background in agronomy, that he was trained as an agronomist and had owned an agronomy business that worked in different parts of the world where they were trying to get crops to succeed in extreme climates.

So he had bought the farm where the tea was being planted as a kind of test station for growing new possible crops.

And that's how the tea had come about.

We were never going to be replacing the likes of Assam, but it was the start of what could be a really niche boutique kind of tea industry where we would get fair returns on the money we were investing and the time we were putting in.

So my plants were planted in September of 2015 and we kind of tucked them in for the winter and hoped for the best that they would start to show signs of growth in the spring.

Because I was relatively close geographically to where he was, he asked if they could come and see me.

I couldn't be there that day, but I was happy for him to show them around and it seemed to go well.

Then he turned up at my doorstep about three weeks later, looking a bit sheepish, and said there was a bit of a misunderstanding when the news agency were there.

They were taken over to your plantation by a couple of my plantation workers.

And as they were filming, they wanted to see some tea being picked.

So the workers went in and started to pick some leaf for the cameras.

In it were three kilograms of processed green tea.

Showing 61–80 of 110 · page 4 of 6