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About Us
2007
We are a family farm in Angus farming wheat, barley, oats and occasionally oilseed rape. Our adventure into tea began when we looked at other crops to diversify into and tea looked exciting! Little did we know what hard yet rewarding work it would be. We sourced cuttings from a mother bush in Cornwall (camellia sinensis var. sinensis) and after three years of watching them struggle with their shallow root systems in the wild and windy Scottish climate concluded they would survive if we protected them in tunnels. What we really needed though was seed, which was impossible to source at this time.
Our Story
2015
Eight years later and our 300 cuttings were mature tea bushes producing 2Kg of made black tea. We launched Scotlands first pure single estate black tea Kinnettles Gold sold to Pekoe Tea in Edinburgh (www.pekoetea.co.uk) and this continues to be the case today with only 2 - 3Kg a year made from this cultivar. This leaf is all hand rolled. It paved the way for the Tea Gardens of Scotland collaboration by proving a concept - beautiful tea can be grown in Scotland.
2016
In 2016 a group of nine ladies joined together to form Tea Gardens of Scotland (www.teagardensofscotland.co.uk). With all of us either in rural business's or farming, as well as some of us having walled gardens, tea seemed the perfect crop. With consultancy help we imported cold tolerant seed from Nepal and ex Soviet Georgia. Tea seed has a long tap root that mines down for minerals, anchors the plant in the soil, are more robust than cuttings and live longer. A cuttings life expectancy is 45 years. A plant grown from seed can live for 100 or more years. (The children's inheritance!)
2020
By 2020 our combined leaf from all of our nine gardens was enough to make a black tea called Nine Ladies Dancing and was made for our group at The Scottish Tea factory by Beverly Wainwright. This is available in Fortnum and Mason on the Rare Tea Counter.
This was the big year we invested heavily in horticulture, growing thousands of tea plants for nursery's and customers around the UK and further afield. It was rewarding to put all the experience gained back in 2016 growing tea from seed to good use. It was also extremely hard work and now we have scaled this right back to concentrate on our tea bushes in the ground, and making lovely teas!
2024
Five of our Tea Gardens of Scotland collective have made a black tea from leaf combined from five of our gardens, called Five Gold Rings, that we have created here at Kinnettles Tea Garden. It is from our gardens in Fife, Angus and Kincardinshire, all on the East Coast of Scotland.
We continue to make our Kinnettles Gold, and a Walled Garden black tea specifically for our visitors only, along with our Kinnettles green tea which is saved for tastings only. Visits include plucking and instruction on how to make a white tea.
Our Climate
Our tea garden, located in Angus on the East Coast of Scotland, on the edge of the Strathmore Valley is at 57 degrees N. Lat.
Our walled garden, filled with tea plants, and a field below this, face south west overlooking the valley and the Kerbet River which leads into the Vale of Strathmore. We are 300ft above sea level so what we gain in lower altitude we loose due to our northerly latitude. Because of this our teas behave like mountain teas, with floral notes that come through due to the stress the tea plants are under. The flavour profile of the made tea is unique, giving tea grown in Scottish its own signature.
Tea plants enjoy acidic soils and ours are mildly acidic. The geology of the hill is a mixture of Lower Old Red Sandstone (Arbuthnott Group) and andesitic lavas which erupted from volcanic vents during the Devonian era (approx 400 million years ago). The sandstones and lavas have been folded by later earth movements to create an up-fold and it is thought that as lavas are harder than sandstones that this has formed the hillside our tea grows on.
On the lower part of the hill the sands and gravels have come about from the melting ice at the end of the last Ice Age, so the soil depth decreases markedly as you come up the hill from the Kerbet River. The soil where our tea grows have been checked for their pH and are between 6.2 - 6.8. This is not ideal for tea, but we are not in a rush and slowly the plants adapt to their conditions.
Undoubtedly the hill provides a micro-climate. We are 12 miles from the sea shore in a rain shadow from the Grampians. The resultant rainfall used to be 600mm (24 inches) per year which is fairly evenly distributed throughout the year with most rainfall in July and August and least rainfall between February and May.
In recent years this has not been a given and we can get a years rainfall in a month! Tea plants love rain, but don’t like to sit in puddles, so free draining soils are perfect for them and exactly what we have.
Temperatures in January show a mean maximum temperature of around 6C and an average minimum daily temperature around 0C. In July the mean daily maximum is around 17C and the mean daily minimum 10C. We are getting temperature spikes now with it going up to 26C on occasions, particularly in April).
The only months guaranteed to be free of frost are May, June, July and August and according to met. data the lowest temperatures can be as low as minus 18. Because of our maritime climate this is only for a night or two at the most.
