About Nature's Leaves
Nature's Leaves is a small loose-leaf tea shop. We blend in batches of a few kilos at a time, source from growers we know personally where we can, and don't carry pyramid teabags. The catalogue rotates with the seasons and what our growers send through. The volume stays small on purpose.
How it started
The shop began as a personal hobby. A trip to a Japanese green-tea farm in Shizuoka in the mid-2010s started the curiosity; a few years of buying small quantities from importers, then directly from individual farms, gradually turned into a small business with a catalogue, a brewing guide, and a steady stream of repeat customers.
Eight years later we're still small. The shop's run by two people — a tea buyer (who handles the relationships with growers and the import logistics) and a tea blender (who handles the herbal blends and the day-to-day order packing). We're not interested in scaling beyond the size we can comfortably manage from a single small workshop.
How we source
Three principles:
- Named growers, not anonymous lots. Wherever possible, our teas come from specific gardens or farmers. The product pages name the region and, often, the specific cooperative or estate. Tea from anonymous wholesale lots is a different product; we don't try to compete on it.
- Fair pricing back to growers. We pay our growers above the local wholesale rate. Where there's a recognised fair-trade certification, we use it; where the supply chain is small enough that we deal directly with farmers, we negotiate prices that reflect their work.
- Small batches. A typical purchase is 5–20kg of a specific tea per order from a grower. The whole catalogue across all 40-ish teas turns over roughly twice a year.
The herbal blends
Our herbal blends are made in-house. Ingredients are sourced from UK and European herbal-medicine suppliers — chamomile from Eastern European farms, lavender from a small grower in Provence, peppermint from a Yorkshire farm, rooibos from South Africa via a direct importer. Each blend is mixed in batches of a few kilos at a time, then packaged into individual pouches.
Blend recipes are tuned based on what comes back from customers. We've changed the chamomile-to-lemon-balm ratio in the Calm blend three times over the last five years; we've added rose petals to the Sleep blend after several customers reported it improved the flavour without weakening the effect.
Packaging and shipping
Tea pouches are foil-lined paper — keeps the tea fresh, fully recyclable in most UK kerbside schemes. Outer shipping boxes are recycled cardboard. We don't use plastic in any part of the packaging chain.
UK shipping via Royal Mail (free over £25, otherwise £3.50). EU and international shipping available; quotes on the product pages. We don't ship to countries with strict tea-import regulations (currently: India, some US states with state-level botanical restrictions).
Wholesale
We supply a handful of independent UK cafés and small food shops. Wholesale starts at 5kg-equivalent monthly orders, with bulk packaging available (1kg pouches instead of 50g/100g). Cafés that take us on report customers buying take-home pouches noticeably more than from anonymous-blend retailers, which is the closest thing to a testimonial we'd offer.
What we don't do
- Pyramid teabags. Mostly because the plastic mesh used in many "silken pyramid" teabags is genuinely terrible — it sheds microplastics into your tea at brewing temperature. The all-paper pyramid alternatives exist but the format is wrong for the kinds of larger-leaf teas we carry.
- Flavoured tea with added oils. Most "flavoured" teas are blended with citrus oil, vanilla extract, etc. We carry one or two genuinely fragrant teas (jasmine green, which is naturally fragrant from scenting; smoked Lapsang Souchong) but we don't add oils to mask poor-quality leaf.
- Detox tea, slimming tea, weight-loss tea. These are marketing categories, not tea categories.
- Tea subscriptions. We've thought about it; we don't do it. Subscribers tend to end up with too much tea they didn't choose; we'd rather you buy when you actually want to.
Get in touch
Email [email protected] — for sourcing questions, sample requests (we send small samples for free with any order over £15; just mention what you'd like to try), wholesale enquiries, or general feedback.