Kew Gardens, Tea Heritage & Women Leading the Way

In our home city of Belfast, we have a very close relationship with the Botanic Gardens at Queens. Over the years, we have grown tea plants with the support of the horticulture team and even run tea-blending workshops from inside the palm house. Earlier this month, I spent a day wandering the paths and glasshouses of Kew Gardens, the world-famous botanical gardens in London. Most people go to see the magnificent plants and flower displays. I went looking for tea.

Kew is well known for its commitment to biodiversity, but it also quietly holds a layered history of tea, its journey through empire, migration and cultivation. The stories are there, if you know where to look. They’re written on the herbarium sheets, tucked into the archives, and echoed in the work of people like Aurora Prehn, a PhD researcher currently unpacking the geographical and colonial legacy of tea in Kew’s Interdisciplinary Research group .

Situated in Ethnobotany, the Plant Humanities and Human Geography , Aurora brings empathy to her contemporary and historic tea research. There is still so much to discover, and people like Aurora, one among many tea scholars, help advance our understanding of how tea has shaped history and society over hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

As part of our 20 Years, 20 Stories campaign at SUKI Tea Makers, this visit felt like something that had come full circle, a moment to reflect not just on where tea comes from, but on how we tell its story, and who gets to tell it.

Aurora’s work on the story of tea also reminds me of the creative writing of Davina Quinlivan, a research fellow with ‘StoryArcs’ (a research programme on story skills funded by the UKRI), whose placement with SUKI has enabled us to collaborate over the last 2 years. In her beautiful and moving book, Shalimar: A Story of Place and Migration, she writes:

“The memory of tea is a memory of elsewhere, of leaves folded into ritual, stories passed down in steam and scent, a history held in the warmth of the cup.

Davina’s words always seem to say what I struggle to put into language,  that tea is never just a drink. It’s a thread. A connection. A memory that moves across generations and borders.

And at Kew, that memory is kept alive not only through science but through the people doing the work. What struck me most on this visit was how many of them are women. They’re researchers, conservators, curators and educators. Women not only preserving tea’s history but reshaping how it’s understood.

At SUKI, that resonates. We’re 70% women run, and the same spirit I saw at Kew with Aurora, that sense of stewardship, of care, runs right through our business too.

These moments matter. They allow us to step back from the product, the blend, the bag, the packaging and think about the bigger picture. About where our tea comes from, and how it carries something more than flavour: it carries meaning.

Whether it’s Aurora in Kew’s collections and archives or Davina writing about memory and migration, the same message keeps surfacing. That tea lives at the crossroads of botany, belonging, and becoming.

To borrow Davina’s words again:

“The memory of tea is a memory of elsewhere…”