Dutch Tea Plantation- Het Zyuderblad

Wenzhuo Liu and Linda Cebrian Rampen

Good news for Chinese readers: related article has been published in the July 2021 <Tea Times 茶博览> tea magazine in Chinese, 观茶者专栏-Het Zyuderblad茶园:分享一杯荷兰好茶”. 


Het Zuderblad tea plantation is the first tea garden in the Netherlands. Linda Cebrian Rampen is the owner of this tea garden. The tea garden is located in Soerendonk, in the south of the Netherlands, near the Belgian border. Linda’s family has run the farm for generations. As the only daughter of her parents, she inherited the farm and developed a tea garden through her own efforts. After a lot of reading research and travel investigation in the previous two years, Linda successfully achieved the first goal of the tea garden in 2015, planting 120 tea trees for outdoor experiments. In 2017, she planted 2000 tea trees in the second batch, and continued to expand in 2018, planting 1000 more tea trees in the garden. The next batch of tea seedlings of different varieties are cultivated in the greenhouse in order to select tea varieties that are more suitable for the Dutch climate. Linda is confident about the future of her tea garden.

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The Past and Future of the First European Tea Plantation – São Miguel

Wenzhuo Liu

Good news for Chinese readers: related article has been published in Wenzhuo‘s column Tea Perspectives of April 2022 <Tea Times 茶博览> tea magazine in Chinese, 观茶者专栏-欧洲第一个茶园的过去和未来”.


As a decorative plant, tea was introduced to São Miguel island by Jacinto Leite, a native of the Azores in Portugal in 1820. It is the administrative capital of the Azores in the central part of the North Atlantic. Among the tea tree varieties brought to the island, only small leaf tea trees are well adapted to the climate and soil of the island. With the decline of the important pillar orange orchard agricultural industry on the island caused by diseases and insect pests from 1840 to 1875, tobacco, sugar beet, pineapple and tea were included in the experiment as alternative economic industries. In 1878 and 1891, two groups of Chinese tea industry experts were invited to the island to guide tea planting and tea processing, and the tea industry was successfully developed. At the beginning of the 20th century, the island had nearly 50 tea gardens and 10 independent factories exporting tea, which played an important role in the island’s economy. An important part of the island’s economy has been established around the planting, processing and export of tea. At that time, São Miguel island also became the only tea producing area in Europe. However, since the 1960s, the impact of the development of the international tea industry chain on the local tea industry, the shortage of local agricultural labor force, and the local policies to increase milk production have accelerated the decline of the whole tea industry on the island. At present, only two tea gardens with a total area of 25 hectares are still in operation, each with tea factories, mainly producing green tea and black tea. Where will the tea industry of São Miguel Island, which has developed for almost three centuries, and the tea culture derived from it go in the future?

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Portuguese Tea Garden – Chá Camélia

Wenzhuo Liu

Good news for Chinese readers: related article has been published in Wenzhuo‘s column Tea Perspectives of March 2022 <Tea Times 茶博览> tea magazine in Chinese, 观茶者专栏-Nina Gruntkowski的葡萄牙酒庄茶园”.


German Nina Gruntkowski moved to Portugal 15 years ago as a Portuguese journalist of German radio broadcast. In an interview in 2011, Peter Oppliger, who initiated the Swiss tea garden in Ascona, gave her a tea tree. She has always dreamed of making more real and touchable products than radio, so she came up with the idea of planting tea trees. Nina first obtained 200 asexually propagated tea seedlings from Peter and planted them in her garden. In 2013, she transformed an old family vineyard into a tea plantation and cooperated with a Camellia expert. They used tea seeds for sexual reproduction and cuttings of mother trees of different small leaf species found in Portugal for asexual reproduction, and successfully developed 12000 clumps of tea trees on the land covering an area of 1 hectare. After more than 10 years of careful cultivation and management, some tea trees can be picked. They mainly produce steamed green tea, and the output is also increasing year by year. In 2019, 12kg, 2020, 50kg, 2021, in addition to 85kg steamed green tea, Nina also began to try to produce a small amount of Oolong tea.

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