I think everyone must have a passion for something. Whether it's baking, sewing, or watching movies, eating out...it's something that drives you, motivates you, keeps you engaged.
As a gardener/horticulturist, I've been growing plants for as long as I can remember. I have had the opportunity to be a part of Gene's Nursery in Savannah Georgia since the early 1990s. The driving force for that nursery was the Camellia and I immediately fell in love with these fantastic winter-blooming beauties. We grew and sold many camellias over the years, and we occasionally would purchase Camellia sinensis from other growers and offer it in our nursery, but we had not propagated it.
Most nursery people I've met can be classified as obsessive nursery people or ONP. We want to grow everything, all the time, with no conception of time or space - we just have to do it. And we never refuse anything- cuttings, seeds, dead plants, you name it - we'll take it. My Tea passion started with a bucket of tea seeds from our nursery friend in Florida, Jerry Conrad, who was also an ONP. He called up one day and said "do you want some tea seeds?", and of course, we said yes - again that's what nursery obsessives do. Three or four days later, a big box arrived by UPS containing a 5 gallon sealed bucket of unshelled tea seeds.
Tea is from the camellia species called Sinensis. They are camellias, but not your typical reds, whites, and pinks you see adorning your garden each fall/winter. They do flower, and that's a great attribute, but their finest and most known use is for making Tea - Green, Oolong & Black traditional teas.
We opened the bucket and spread out the seeds in their husks on cardboard sheets and let them sit in the sun. Not long after, the hulls start to split open revealing the beautiful dark brown seeds. It can be painstaking shelling seeds, but it was a task my little 2-year-old granddaughter took on with enthusiasm.
After The Shelling
The seeds were shelled and soaked in water overnight and then we planted them. Camellia sinensis seeds can take anywhere from 3-6 months to germinate. We planted all the seeds and our final tally was about 5000 plants. We took a section at the nursery and placed all of our tea seedlings out to grow in containers.
The Tea Plants Grow Up
Over the next year, they took off and what we started noticing was the diversity in the plants. Leaf sizes, growth habits, even variegation were variable within the group. We started selecting plants that we felt were unique and that would have a place - as an evergreen flowering shrub - in most landscape gardens. The tea plants began to flower but most were typical Camellia Sinensis flowers. We did notice that some were pink and most were white. We took about 40 plants out of the original 5000 and planted them for production and evaluation. We still have those 40 plants in our garden today.
Above - Original Tea Planting 2012
Pictured above: Tea Farm/Garden 2023
Let's Make Some Tea
A few years after we started growing tea, people found out about it and the response to this plant was enormous. The main question I was always asked was how do you make it? That one stumped me because I knew nothing about making my own tea. I had only grown them for ornamental use. That prompted my search for just how to do that. What I found was there were very few resources available to help people learn how to make tea from Sinensis. There were no books, there were no videos, and there were no people to offer help. So I learned what I could from the little bits of info I was able to find and I experimented. From that very first batch - I knew I was hooked. I was amazed at just how easy it is to make tea from my plants with a little effort and I've been doing it ever since.
Teaching Others
I am in no way a tea professional. I'm not a tea sommelier or a master tea maker. But I am a gardener and I know how to make something that I like and that's the most important part. I'm sure there are many who will disagree with my tea making because it's not 'proper' or the way professionals do it, but it works for me, I'm not selling it, I'm just drinking it and the only one I have to satisfy is me!
I have had the pleasure of giving many lectures and helping hundreds of people over the years to learn more about tea. My favorite groups are the kids! It's the perfect hands-on task for them and hopefully by teaching our kids to grow their own tea, it will be something that they will take with them the rest of their lives. My grandkids have grown up in the nursery and have had their little hands in the growing and making tea from early on.
The Tea Gardener
Because I had such a difficult time trying to find any resource at all on making tea in my home garden, I decided that my role is not to harvest tea and sell it but to introduce other gardeners to the idea of growing and making their own tea. In 2020, I released the first edition of The Tea Gardener - your personal guide to growing and making your own tea.
Book availabe in our store at Blackcreek Nursery. Digital Copy available online.
