Revisited: A Scottish tea mystery, episode one – green shoots
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What is the Scottish tea mystery being introduced?
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Hi, it's Madeleine here. The Science Weekly team is on a break, so for the next two weeks we'll be bringing you some of our favourite episodes from the past year. This week you'll hear a Scottish tea mystery, our investigation into an eye-catching business venture that seemed just too good to be true, and how science finally provided some answers. Here's episode one, I hope you enjoy it.
It's 2014 and a new venture in Scotland is starting to generate a buzz.
When I first came here, I met the fellow community, the agricultural community, and they asked me what I was going to do here. And I told them I was going to grow tea. And there was a sort of raising of eyebrows and a few wry smiles, and they just went, hey, right...
Explaining his audacious entry into the world of tea growing to BBC presenter Mark Stephen is Tam O'Brien.
My name's O'Brien. And as you can see, the river that marks out the boundary of our land is the brand, the River Bran, which the whole of the glen's named after. So they've renamed me. I'm no longer Tom O'Brien. I'm Tam O'Brien.
Back then, I wasn't long into my career as a science journalist. And it would be a few months until I met Tam myself for a feature I was writing. And in the decades since, there's been a question tucked away at the back of my mind. Something that I just couldn't figure out. Until now. And over the next three episodes, that's the story you're going to be hearing. I'm Nicola Davis, science correspondent at The Guardian. This is a special miniseries from Science Weekly, a Scottish tea mystery. Let there be no doubt, journalists love a quirky story. And for a British journalist like me, what's better than a quirky story about tea? Which is why, in 2015, I ended up in one of London's fanciest hotels, the Dorchester.
By the time we met, Tam O'Brien had already been making waves with his new venture. He was everywhere, on TV, radio, even social media, telling anyone he could about his wee tea plantation on the Dalryock Estate in Perthshire.
Those plants were originally propagated from three plants we brought in from Italy. We were told categorically by people who'd been working in the tea industry for 30, 40 years that it couldn't be done.
Here is a beautiful bush that's just giving us the tips of the tea. From this, we'll make white tea or the one of the finest teas in the world.
I sat down with Tam, together with the director of food and beverage at the Dorchester. Tam was supplying them with his Scottish-grown teas and had even helped set up a rooftop tea garden. He was a fascinating character, very dapper, with twinkling eyes and the total self-assuredness of an entrepreneur. And there was nothing, it seemed, he didn't know about tea.
We surround that heavily plucked plant in a tree guard. This tree guard contains... ultraviolet light inhibitors. So they use retard photosynthesis by holding back 99% of the light spectrum. Why would you want to retard photosynthesis in a plant? Well, as I think my father would have been able to tell most people, my dad was quite proud of the fact that he could grow rhubarb underneath the kitchen sink without a drop of soil or water. I mean, a lot of people know this. It's been going on for 60 years, if not far, far more. So we've been able to grow and force crops to grow. If you stand in the growing sheds, you can hear those plants growing. They're growing so fast. That's not literal. You can't seriously hear them.
Oh, wow. Yes, you can. Can you? Yeah.
As we chatted, he explained to me how he'd been successfully propagating Camellia sinensis for several years, his wee tea plantation now boasting 14,000 plants.
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