Odd places to grow tea bushes

Freiburg / DPA

Gardeners love to try out plants far from their native range, but can you believe that someone wants to grow tea near the Alps?
“We’re having a tinker,” say farmer Erwin Wagner and gardener Werner Hanser. It’s three years since they began their experiment, and as the winter approaches, they’re bringing the Chinese tea plants, all of them in planter pots, inside a greenhouse.
So far they’ve judged it a success. The plants seem to thrive in their field in Freiburg, southern Germany, on the edge of the Black Forest, where they neighbour other crops including maize and grains. But until they
can actually turn the plants into
real, drinkable tea, Wagner and Hanser estimate that they need about five years.
“We have to remain patient,” they say. The project began when the university town was twinned with the Chinese town of Qingdao. “The city on the Yellow Sea gave us 75 kilograms of Chinese tea seeds,” says Bernd Dallmann, Freiburg tourism and economy promoter. “In return we sent
them some vines from Baden, which are thriving in Qingdao.” Despite
its closeness to the Alps, Freiburg benefits from a temperate climate, but it is hardly in the league of Assam or Candy.
Growing tea here is a labour of love rather than a profitable venture. Wagner and Hanser are busy caring for their plants; they now have 2,500 tubs of them. “We were able to completely go without chemicals,” says 52-year-old Hanser proudly. But the rest is all experiment.
“We don’t have an instruction manual,” adds Wagner, 59. “It wouldn’t help us anyway, because we can’t understand Chinese.” Because the plants like sandy soil, the tubs were placed for the summer on the local beach-volleyball pitch.
The pair have every confidence in their’s project’s success. In a sunny region where vines and other crops thrive, there’s no reason why tea shouldn’t grow too, they say. And agriculture has always benefited from experimentation, they add. With climate change fast becoming a reality, they need to try out new things.
Hundreds of kilometres further north, in the chilly city of Hamburg, are the offices of the German Tea Association. “We’re following this project with great interest,” says director Maximilian Wittig.
Tea has only been grown in Germany in botanic gardens or for ornamental or research purposes, he says. The
idea of someone growing tea for sale
in Germany is completely new. “There’s never been a tea from Germany on
the market,” he says.
And it’s not just a rarity in Germany, but also in Europe as a whole, he says. The first European tea has been grown in England, one of the world’s most tea-loving nations, since 2005. There are also plantations in Scotland and in Switzerland.
“The deciding factor is of course whether the tea tastes any good,” says Wittig. Demand for tea is increasing in Germany as Germans start drinking more of the hot drink and there’s also a growing trend for unusual products. So, tea from the Freiburg region may well find an appreciative audience.