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

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

So we're talking about three kilos of dry leaf.

So you need quite a substantial amount more of that picked from the plants.

I look him in the eye and say, so you're telling me that this is all from my plants?

And he held my eye contact and said, yes, it is.

And the agreement had always been that he would sell the tea.

So he took away most of that.

But I took a small amount so that I could, you know, taste some myself and maybe show off to my family that actually, you know, I had the first Scottish tea that I'd managed to grow myself.

But in the back of my mind, I was thinking, this just doesn't ring true.

I went through my tea plantation and I could see no appreciable difference in the plants from what they had looked like three weeks before.

And then I took 30 grams of the tea that he'd left me and I counted out the individual leaves and then extrapolated that figure up to the full amount of what he had in the bucket and realised that if he'd picked every leaf of every plant in my plantation, he couldn't have achieved the amount of tea that was in that bucket.

I saw that there were also these little tiny, they're called silver needles, the Chinese call grandfather's eyebrows, which are these tiny little leaf shoots that are indicative of a first flush, as we call it, where the very young leaf growth is coming in the spring on a tea plant.

Now, at that time of year, there was no first flush of tea on those plants.

And yet in this tea that had supposedly come from my bushes, there were very clearly these little silver needles.

It was a strangely conflicted moment because on one side I was proud that maybe I had produced some tea for the first time, but then I still had this niggling feeling that it couldn't possibly have come from my plants.

As that year progressed, they'd never really thrived terribly well.

You start to think, as an early grower of these things, that maybe your knowledge is just not that great yet and you're not doing quite the right thing.

When I first visited, he showed me these large plants, looked more like trees, big bushes four or five feet high, which he described as the mother plants from which he'd taken cuttings and which he then propagated the tea that I and others had bought as plants.

Plants that had grown in Scotland for Scottish conditions and ready to be put out in a Scottish field.

And we thought, he's selling tea to these interesting institutions, so they must be able to thrive well in Scottish conditions.

Those who bought six months to a year later seemed to have much, much more success.

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