Suikyo Organic tea garden by Fumiaki and Luna

JAPAN: SUIKYO ORGANIC TEA GARDEN BY FUMIAKI AND LUNA

The Suikyo tea garden of Fumiaki and Luna Iwata and their team is located in Nara Prefecture, not far from the city of the same name, which is famous for its ancient Buddhist temples. In a picturesque, sparsely populated hilly landscape, diverse soils and locations provide the perfect basis for the unique flavours of Suikyo teas. Today, the tea garden comprises more than forty different small plots on an area of nine hectares.

Depending on the soil, location, fertiliser, and processing, the same type of cultivar can lead to astonishingly different flavours in tea. Fumiaki, Luna, and the team at the Suikyo tea garden are passionate about making these subtle nuances perceptible – and making the interrelationships in nature tangible. To this end, they take care to preserve and emphasise the special characteristics of the tea leaves at every stage of production. The result is unique, organic quality teas whose character is as clear as if you were drinking pure spring water.

A strong team

Originally, the Suikyo tea garden was a family-run tea garden that Fumiaki Iwata took over from his parents. His family has been cultivating the land for seventeen generations, and his parents converted to organic cultivation during Fumiaki’s childhood in the 1980s.

Today, Fumiaki and his wife Luna no longer run the business as a traditional family tea garden, but as a core team of five people who make all decisions together. From spring to autumn, they are joined by many other helpers, as the steep slopes are particularly difficult to cultivate.

A tea factory full of ideas and possibilities

The Suikyo tea garden’s tea factory, idyllically situated at the edge of the forest, is full of ideas and possibilities. Though not large, it is set up in such a way that both sencha and kamairicha, withered teas, steamed tamaryokucha and black tea – from light yellow to deep red black teas – can be produced. Much of it is self– built since the experimental work and processes in this special tea garden also require special tools.

“Tea fields” and “tea mountains”

A first step in approaching the concept of the Suikyo tea garden is the distinction used by the team between “tea fields” (cha-batake) and “tea mountains” (cha-yama). The term “tea fields” refers to areas that have been levelled and straightened by humans. In the mid to late 20th century, agriculture in Japan was gradually mechanised. In order to enable fertilisation and harvesting with small machines, more and more tea gardens were therefore laid out flat or levelled. In the case of “tea mountains”, the original hilly shape is preserved, which can be very steep in places.

Most farms are now abandoning such sites because the work on the slopes is too arduous and dangerous. The Suikyo team has even replanted such sites: Fumiaki, Luna and their team have set themselves the task of preserving the unique cultural landscape in Nara by taking over old tea mountains in the neighbourhood when the owners are no longer able to or no longer want to cultivate them.

Observing, learning and experimenting with nature together

The approach of the Suikyo tea garden team is to observe and analyse nature and the tea plants together, to exchange ideas, and to experiment and learn. Fumiaki, Luna and their team have mapped the garden. They know the soil composition of each of the forty plots; they know how old the bushes are, they’ve checked the compass direction and sunlight; and they distinguish between flat “tea fields” and “tea mountains”.

Using the many parcels, the team can compare and understand the relationships between soil, location, tea cultivar, fertiliser, processing, and other factors that affect the taste and fragrance of the teas. They also make comparisons over the course of time, be it from year to year – for example, at certain times after rain or drought, or over the course of the plants‘ lifespan, when they might compare ten and twenty-year-old bushes.

Fumiaki, Luna, Yoko and the other two members of the Suikyo core team devote themselves to their studies – especially in the winter months, a phase when tea farmers might usually find time to rest a little. They attend courses and workshops on scientific soil analysis as well as on biodynamic cultivation methods. They combine their theoretical knowledge with their own observations in the tea garden. One winter, for example, they used the time to record the grasses and weeds on their plots.

Withered green teas

The withered green teas are a wonderful result of the Suikyo tea garden’s experiments. The harvested tea leaves are withered in a cool, shady wooded area right next to the tea factory. The process is time-consuming and weather-sensitive, but the teas develop a wonderful floral fragrance while retaining their green colour.

The Suikyo tea garden uses the term ichou for withering: the process is defined by the tea leaves losing some water and developing an intense fragrance without losing their green colour. This all happens while the leaves are carefully spread out and not moved unnecessarily. The term hakkou, on the other hand, is used to describe the fermentation of tea leaves that takes place during black tea production. These are enzymatic processes that take place after rolling – the breaking up of the leaf cells – through their reaction with oxygen. This changes the colour of the leaves to reddish.

Grasses, leaves and wood as fertiliser

As soon as Fumiaki took over the tea garden, he noticed that the teas partly took on some of the flavours of the organic fertilisers used. From then on, he omitted all fertilisers of animal origin. Instead, he began to feed the tea plants with grasses, leaves and wood cuttings. He cuts grasses and reeds at the edge of the field and also leaves extra areas free for their “cultivation”. This old cultural technique of farming is also known as the chagusaba method and has been recognised by the United Nations as the “Traditional Tea-grass Integrated System”.

Leaves and prunings, for example, come from neighbouring oak and chestnut forests. These are cleared and, once the thin side branches are removed and shredded to be used as fertiliser for the tea fields, the tree trunks are used for shiitake cultivation. Incidentally, Fumiaki’s father has been enthusiastically growing shiitake mushrooms here for many years.

In contrast to plant management based purely on soil laboratory analyses or rigid intervals at which certain fertilisers are applied, observation forms the basis for everything at Suikyo. The Suikyo team observes the plants, the growth, the flavour of the leaves, the development of the roots, and the way and speed at which grass and leaves are converted into humus. Fumiaki calculates how much the harvest takes from the ecosystem, then adds this amount back.

With this cultivation method, the amount he harvests is only two-thirds to half the average in Japanese tea cultivation; however, the tea plants develop their natural flavour. Nuances become perceptible that would otherwise be masked by the flavour influence of typical organic fertilisers. With this approach, the Suikyo tea garden has set out to go its own way and create its own world of flavours – full of aromas and fragrances unknown elsewhere.

Using all their senses to understand the soil

A few years ago, Luna and Fumiaki were given wines that were grown on different soils. Without ever having studied wine in depth, they were able to deduce the soil types from the flavour of the wines. They were able to transfer their knowledge of soils and their influence on the flavour of tea directly to the wines.

There are three main types of soil in the Suikyo tea garden: loamy, sandy-siliceous, and volcanic. Similar to wine, the flavour of teas from loamy soils is comparatively full and intense, while the flavour of volcanic soils is rather light and mineral.

From observations, the Suikyo team has concluded that the nature of the soil is also reflected in the fragrance. They describe this as being not about the actual scent, but about where one perceives the scent. In the case of volcanic soils, according to their explanation, this tends to be at the front of the nose. Suikyo considers such teas to be more accessible and easier to understand. With clay soils, the scent can be felt deeper in the throat. Teas from such locations are usually somewhat more complex in flavour.

Last but not least, differences in colour were also observed. The finished tea leaves and the infusion of tea from plots with volcanic soil tend to be green in colour, while they tend towards yellow in the case of clay soil.

Focus and naturalness

The harvest and tea season in spring is a time of maximum concentration for the whole team. The core team and the most important helpers live, eat, and sleep together on site for weeks at a time during this season. They focus 100 per cent on their work, and on consciously experiencing this special time. During these weeks, they also advise all guests not to use perfumed cosmetics. This is because they rely heavily on all their senses, including their sense of smell, when harvesting and producing. Any additional odour in the air would impair their judgement and, in the worst case, could lead to work steps being carried out too early or too late and the quality suffering.

The members of the Suikyo tea garden also maintain a natural lifestyle in other respects. They enjoy food made from fresh, home-grown or gathered vegetables such as aubergines, okra and warabi and use seasonal, organic food from the region. Not to be missed are the umeboshi (dried plums) for which their region is famous. And they often receive other delicacies such as mandarins from Shikoku from like-minded friends and relatives throughout Japan.

Mishou: Seed-grown plants of specific varieties

Nowadays, individual tea garden plots are usually planted with cuttings from one cultivar. Cuttings are genetically identical to the mother plant. This ensures that one field has plants of one variety, which grow at the same rate and are ready to be harvested at the same time.

By contrast, in recent years, Fumiaki, Luna, and their helpers have also replanted several “tea mountains” with seed-grown tea bushes. To do this, they planted six to eight tea seeds by hand in each seedbed. However, the bushes are not conventional Zairai bushes, where the mix of varieties is unknown, but come from seeds of a particular variety. In Japanese, these are known as “mishou” tea plants, for example Mishou Yabukita.

In the second year, with a bit of luck, several small plants sprout from each seedbed. Of these, only the plant that most closely resembles the sown variety and has grown well is left in the ground. Here the team receives support from Professor Takeda: the tea plant specialist can determine with the naked eye which young plant is most similar to the target variety.

Why all this effort? Seed-grown plants develop from the seeds of a mother plant that have been pollinated with the pollen of various father plants. This means that closely related but not identical plants sprout from the individual tea seeds. A plant can be very similar or less similar to the selected variety. Selection results in a plot of seed-grown plants that are nevertheless largely similar in terms of the time of sprouting, leaf shape and flavour.

Seed-grown tea plants develop a particularly strong, deep-growing taproot. This allows the plants to reach deep layers of soil and utilise the nutrients. At the same time, they root more stably on slopes and are generally more robust. In contrast, tea plants grown from cuttings, which are usually planted on flat tea fields, root shallowly and broadly. They can only draw nutrients from the humus-rich surface that was spread when the flat fields were planted. This reveals the complex interplay between plant growth, cultivation methods, and the cultural landscape.

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Some Suikyo Teas