The Dartmoor Tea Estate is part of a fledgling movement of British tea growers

MARK PASSMORE FOR THE TIMES

It is quintessentially English: the drink that brought us through the Blitz, the essence of an aristocratic break to the day at 4.30pm, the casus belli with numerous trade unions insisting on time off for a cuppa. Tea, in the eyes of Asterix and most other foreigners, is intimately associated with the British. But it is not a native drink. No tea is harvested in our pleasant land. Tea came from China. Then from India, Ceylon, parts of Africa — indeed anywhere where the terroir and cheap labour made its production profitable.

Now tea is at last being grown where it is drunk. Two dedicated tea enthusiasts have been cultivating Camellia sinensis, the tea plant, in a quiet valley on the edge of Dartmoor for two decades. It took a while for enough of the 1,000 seeds ordered by Jo Harper and his wife Kathryn to germinate and become a 10,000-plant tea garden. But persistence, in the face of the climate, the sceptics and the lack of any market, has paid off. Now the Dartmoor Tea ­Estate is producing leaves that sell for £2,600 a kilo, garner the gushing surprise of professional tasters and are sold at the Yushu Tea Gallery in London.

The Harpers acknowledge they cannot compete with Assam, Darjeeling or the teabag industry. England will never be carpeted with lush green tea gardens. English tea will remain niche, expensive and sought after — rather like coffee from St Helena or whisky from a corner of Suffolk (both of them award-winners). But research is naturally now going on apace in universities to find the chemical profile of Dartmoor leaves, breed plants best suited to the English climate and trumpet the health benefits of a homegrown cuppa.

Sceptics raise eyebrows. But sceptics also once mocked the idea of English wine, now a multimillion-pound award-winning industry. Just wait. ­English tea will one day be served at the Palace.