In many conventional tea farms (left image below), tea bushes are planted in neat rows and pruned to a uniform height for harvesting. Wild-grown tea trees grow among trees and other forest plants, taking on their own shapes and growing at their own pace, shaped by the soil, sunlight and changing seasons around them (right image below). This is what we mean by wild-grown.
At Stone Soup, the wild-grown teas we offer come from diverse forest environments, grown without synthetic pesticides, fertilisers or tilling. Human intervention is kept to a minimum, allowing the surrounding plants to grow alongside the tea.
Wild-grown doesn’t necessarily mean that a tea tree has never been planted or cared for by a person. It describes the environment it grows in and the relationship people have with it. The growers observe the trees, hand-harvest their leaves and carefully craft them into tea. The work begins with paying attention to what is already there.
The growing environment is one part of a tea’s story. The variety of tea tree, the weather, the harvest and the way the leaves are processed all help shape what we taste. Wild-grown tea can be white, black, green or oolong; the term describes how it grows, rather than how it is made.
For us, choosing wild-grown tea is a way of paying more attention to the landscape behind each cup, the people who care for it, and the place tea has within a living forest.
a hike to one of our wild-grown tea forests: