Revisited: A Scottish tea mystery, episode one – green shoots

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1:18Nicola Davis: Hi, it's Madeline 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.

2:04And there was a sort of raising of eyebrows and a few wry smiles, and they just went, hey, right.

2:14Nicola Davis: Explaining his audacious entry into the world of tea growing to BBC presenter Mark Stephen is Tam O 'Bran. My name's O 'Brien. And as you can see, the river that marks out the boundary of our land is the Brann, the River Brann, 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.

2:43Nicola Davis: 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.

3:04Nicola Davis: 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.

3:21Episode 1.

3:23Nicola Davis: Green Shoots.

3:28Nicola Davis: 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 'Bran 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.

4:20Here is a beautiful bush that's just giving us the tips of the tea. From this we'll make white tea or one of the finest teas in the world.

4:31Nicola Davis: 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?

5:12Well, 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. We have 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.

5:46Nicola Davis: As we chatted, he explained to me how he'd been successfully propagating camellia sinensis for several years, his weed tea plantation now boasting 14 ,000 plants. The plantation had scooped a gold award from the Salon Duté in Paris for its Dalryoc smoked white tea and was selling to luxury hotels like the Dorchester and the Balmoral in Edinburgh. It seemed eccentric, amusing and the sort of plucky thing that was worth reporting.

6:20Nicola Davis: More than 300 miles away in Scotland, someone else heard about his story too. I started to hear publicity about this guy who was growing tea and selling plants in Scotland. Drinks writer Richard Ross was intrigued. 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. Richard exudes a calm confidence, his light blue eyes giving away that he's both very shrewd and has a knack for recognising the ridiculous. I met up with him recently in the Butterfly and Pig Tea Room, a cavernous cafe just off a busy road in the centre of Glasgow.

7:06Nicola Davis: It was filled with dark wooden furniture, mist-matched cups and saucers and lots of novelty teapots. After a scone with cream and jam, alongside our Earl Grey's and English breakfasts, Richard explained his journey into growing tea. 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. All these threads fell into place with a moment of serendipity on a long drive. Driving down the road from this piece of land in Perthshire back to my home in Glasgow and hearing a BBC report talking about how this guy had started to grow tea in Scotland and was starting to sell it to some quite major hotels and restaurants in London.

8:00Pretty much immediately after hearing that report, I thought, well, this is somebody I should probably go and visit.

8:04Nicola Davis: 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. 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.

8:45And so I agreed fairly quickly to buy 500 tea plants from him.

8:52Nicola Davis: According to Tam, these were tea plants that he'd been selectively breeding and cultivating to better suit Scottish conditions. They were Scottish tea plants, as far as it was possible. Tam also put Richard in touch with the other growers around Scotland, and together they set up a sort of cooperative called the Scottish Tea Growers Association. 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 south-west. So really all four points of the compass in Scotland.

9:30Nicola Davis: And Tam was at the centre of it all. 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 sort of 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 sort of new possible crops. And that's how the tea had come about. Because Tam was already processing and selling tea, he was going to be the middleman for the hotels and shops too, taking a commission from the tea he sold. Their Scottish tea would inevitably be exclusive small batches that came with a much higher price tag than your average cuppa.

10:15We 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.

10:39Nicola Davis: While Richard's tea hibernated through the chilly winter months Tam continued to promote his new venture As spring drew near, a French news agency decided to visit As they were keen to see not just Tam's plantation But also one of the others too 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 on 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.

11:18They 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.

11:32Nicola Davis: Tam explained that before he could stop them, Richard's entire crop had been picked and that's when he produced a big plastic tub In it were three kilograms of processed green tea 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.

12:21But in the back of my mind, I was thinking, this just doesn't ring true.

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13:37Nicola Davis: Richard was suspicious. A whole bucket of tea from his plants? This was February in the Highlands. Surely there couldn't have been that much growth already? Curious and annoyed he hadn't got to pick his plants first, Richard went to go and have a look at them. 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.

14:24Nicola Davis: Richard wondered whether Tam had bolstered the bucket of leaves with some from his own plantation to make it look a bit more impressive. But the sheer amount of tea in the bucket wasn't the only thing raising doubts in Richard's mind. I saw that there were also these little tiny, they call silver needles, the Chinese called 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.

15:05It 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.

15:23Nicola Davis: Richard wasn't the only one with questions. After writing up my article, I tried to find out more about the Wee Tea Plantation Salon d 'Ital Award. As a tea drinker myself, I wondered who'd won it before. But beyond news articles about Tamswin, I couldn't find any record of any such award anywhere. And in the back of my mind too, it just felt a bit too good to be true that he'd already managed to produce enough tea to sell to several hotels and shops. In all the pictures and films I'd seen of his plantation, all the plants looked rather twiggy. What we're finding in Scotland, it's taking eight years, maybe ten years before the plants mature, if they survive.

16:15Nicola Davis: Beverley Clare Wainwright is a tea consultant based in Scotland with an extensive career working on plantations in Sri Lanka. The quantity of plants you need in order to produce any kind of a crop is quite substantial. So for example, some of the growers in Scotland with 1 ,500 plants that are seven years old, producing as little as one kilo of tea per year. It may be a long and difficult process, but it's not completely outlandish to try to grow tea in Scotland. Beverley herself has attempted it. So let me tell you what tea requires to grow. Soil pH 4.5 to 5.5, so it's quite acidic. It requires 1 ,500 millimetres of rain for a year.

17:02Nicola Davis: So it needs acidic soils and, it turns out, a lot of rain. Believe it or not, some areas in Scotland aren't wet enough. Here in Perthshire, we only have 800 millimetres per year. So even in Scotland, it generally needs to be irrigated. And the other big thing, tea is quite an unusual plant. It takes oxygen up through the root. and so the soil that they're in has to be free-flowing. So they constantly need water to keep them alive but you can't sit them in a tub of water because they will literally drown and die. Then there's the cold. Below 10 degrees, tea plants go dormant and with its very short days for much of the year, Scotland's tea growing seasons are rather brief.

17:51In many cases, people lose more than 50 % of their plants in the effort of trying to grow them.

17:58Nicola Davis: And yet, as Tam's new cooperative of Scottish tea growers proved, there were plenty of people willing to give it a go. You know, it's very interesting making tea, growing tea. People get hooked into tea and, you know, it's quite obsessive. There's a huge amount of romance behind it.

18:20Nicola Davis: So with my doubts pushed to the back of my mind, as usual, I had to get on with the next story. Richard moved on too, trying to coax his plants into getting bushy 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 He stayed hopeful, Tam's plants were thriving 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.

19:07Plants 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.

19:23Nicola Davis: And some of his colleagues, who'd also bought plants from TAM, weren't doing too badly at all. Those who bought six months to a year later seemed to have much, much more success. The people who'd bought these plants, one or two of them had a background in agriculture and farming, and we thought, well, maybe that kind of lifetime knowledge is really playing out here and they just know what they're doing. But as each new season rolled around, Richard's plants weren't happy. They just weren't coping with the Scottish conditions. It wasn't just his plants that were being difficult. Tam had, well, changed.

19:59Nicola Davis: No longer a charming country gent full of maverick ideas and a passion for his growers. He could get quite prickly and could be quite difficult to talk to. And he could take offence quite easily at things that were said to him. And so we found that we were kind of tiptoeing around him more and more as time went on. He also became harder to get hold of. We started to get communications from somebody who said they were his office manager. And increasingly those emails from this office manager were really trying to put us off getting in touch with Tam himself. They would be very much phrased as Tam's taking some time away from the business or he's got health issues at the moment and is taking some time away or he's travelling in China as well.

20:51All ways of not letting us speak to him, actually.

21:04Nicola Davis: And there was someone else Tam was avoiding who was desperately trying to track him down

21:21Nicola Davis: Paolo Zacchera is a nursery man from northern Italy He grows lots of different plants on the slopes of Lake Maggiore, including tea, which is how he ended up getting to know Tam. I am the only person in Europe growing between 20 ,000 and 30 ,000 small plants of tea each year. So somehow he contacted me. He said how successful he was in selling this tea, Scottish tea, in big hotels. The most expensive hotels in London are a good price you could get. So he was asking me for a lot of plants. And when he saw my plants grow in here, he pushed me to say, go ahead, I will sell your tea with no problem and just go on and plant and grow more plants.

22:10Nicola Davis: Because there's no such thing as native Scottish tea, Tam had to start with plants from abroad to be able to take cuttings and seeds to grow the hardiest possible cultivars better suited to Scottish weather. And so he got to know Paolo. He was my guest here and he came three or four times in Barbagna, in my home. And some friends of us were making a party because the daughter had just graduated from university. And there was a small group playing and they said, but all the girls here want to dance and nobody make them dance. So it worked. all the evening to make everybody dance. And it was very successful.

22:52It was a very good relation with people, pushing people well.

22:56Nicola Davis: Charmed by Tam and his dancing abilities, Paolo expanded his efforts with tea and started supplying Tam with plants from his hill on the lakeside. And for years, they worked well together. It was good until the last time when I brought him to the airport and they gave me a very good bottle of whiskey as a present and told me when I'm going home, I'm going to pay you. The money never arrived. So I tried to call him, send him email. First, the secretary said, oh, he's away, he's in China, or whatever, when he comes back, he will be available. And then I could not get any touch with him. They never heard of him anymore.

23:41Nicola Davis: Something very strange was brewing, and an unpaid bill was just the start of it. We always had this gap as in, we know he's been selling tea, but what is he actually selling? And it's only once you start digging into the nuts and bolts of the claims that you start to think to yourself, right, there's something not quite right here.

24:06Nicola Davis: That's tomorrow's episode. A Scottish Tea Mystery was reported and presented by me, Nicola Davis It was produced by Madeleine Finlay The sound design was by Joel Cox And the executive producer was Ellie Buey

24:40This is The Guardian.