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Carolina Select Tea - Charleston Tea LLC

The Fleming family has been growing tea in the USA for over 40 years and is the First Family of Tea. We will be adding more products soon as well as the History of Tea in the United States as seen through Mack Fleming's experience.

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Please contact us with any questions and comments at: randall@carolinaselecttea.com

Mack Fleming talks about tea

"Tea is fascinating," Fleming muses. "The plants here are at
least 112 years old. Some tea plants in China and India are 800 years old, and
they're still healthy and producing."

He gestures across the driveway, where acres of green, square-trimmed tea
bushes stretch almost to the horizon. "These plants," Fleming says,
"are descendants of the first tea plants ever brought to the United
States.

And because they're hearty and grow so thick, we don't have to use
insecticides or fungicides. Each plant is also grown from original cuttings,
not from seeds fertilized by different parents. We want the same plants every
time, so we take cuttings from existing plants and grow direct clones. It's
more work, but it keeps quality consistent."

Fleming bought the plantation in 1987 from the Lipton company, which had
used it as an experimental plot for decades. But the story of tea-growing in
the United States actually begins in 1799. According to Fleming, that's when
the first tea bushes arrived in this country—probably by mistake. "They
came with a large shipment of other plants for the French botanist André
Micheaux, who was putting together what is today the Middleton Place Gardens
near Charleston."

In 1848, a planter named Junius Smith took some Micheaux tea cuttings from
Middleton Place, along with others from overseas, and nurtured them into the
first commercial tea crop at his Golden Grove Plantation, some 20 miles from
Wadmalaw Island. "Smith's tea business was a success for five years,"
Fleming says, "right up until the time he was shot and killed."

In 1874, a landed gentleman named Dr. Alexis Forster tried tea farming, this
time in the South Carolina burg of Georgetown. The venture thrived for five
years — again, right up until its proprietor's untimely death. "Dr.
Forster is said to have been traveling home in his buggy and was set upon by
'rascals,'" Fleming tells me. "While he was being chased, his buggy
hit a rock in the road and flipped. He was killed."

Next came the biochemist Dr. Charles Shepard, who in 1888 set up the
100-acre Pinehurst Tea Plantation. Within a few years, Pinehurst's tea became a
national favorite. But after Shepard's death in 1915 — "of natural
causes," Fleming notes — the plantation went to pot.

Lipton established its research station on Wadmalaw Island in 1963. Taking
cuttings from the plants at Pinehurst, the company set about seeing if
high-quality tea could still be grown with them. The results were promising,
and in 1978 Mack Fleming joined Lipton as the farm's director of tea
horticulture.

Then, in 1985, a tea taster and buyer for an American supermarket chain paid a visit. Bill Hall had read an article in a trade magazine that said tea
couldn't be successfully grown for commercial use in America. The farm on Wadmalaw Island convinced him otherwise. The sandy soil drained well, the climate was humid enough. It looked like a perfect place to grow tea.

Credited:
Donovan Webster

Donovan Webster is a journalist and author. He writes from Charlottesville, Virginia.

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