Grow Your Own Tea

Christine Parks, together with her husband, David, developed Camellia Forest Tea Gardens in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The Parks family has worked for decades collecting, propagating, and testing camellia cultivars for hardiness—today Christine and David are partners in Tea Flower Research, which has formalized the family’s work. She was chair of the Tea Committee of the American Camellia Society, and a founding member of the US League of Tea Growers and representative for southeastern growers.Susan Morrison Walcott is an emerita professor of geography at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She has sipped soup-like buttery tea in Tibet and visited Hangzhou’s tea gardens and tea museum during a research trip to China’s high technology parks—a geographers’ curiosity leads down more roads than cat has lives. She is a founding member of the US League of Tea Growers and has published several articles on tea grown in the United States in academic journals.