Gaye LeBaron: Small grove of tea trees recall Fountaingrove’s past

This may come as a surprise to the county ag commissioner, but there is now a small tea plantation, 60 young trees, looking very healthy on a hillside above Santa Rosa.

That’s right. Tea. The world’s second most popular drink, after water. It is generally, and rightfully, considered a product of distant and exotic places, like China and India and Japan and Sri Lanka. While there is a successful tea plantation in Charleston, South Carolina, and a smaller California enterprise called the Golden Feather Tea Farm near Oroville that burned in the Camp fire of 2018, I venture to say that this is a “first” for Sonoma County.

The 60 tiny trees from rootstock that survived the Camp fire are believed to have descended from seeds carried lovingly from Japan in 1869. That’s when a group of 22 adventurers, fleeing civil war, established the short-lived Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Co. in California’s gold-crazy Sierra Nevada foothills, thereby becoming the first Japanese in California.

All the particulars of how these young trees came to the vineyards of Paradise Ridge Winery is … well, too detailed to explain in the space allotted.

Just know that the connector is a Southern Californian named Nao Magami, who retired from an advertising and marketing career in both the U.S. and Japan and is now a docent at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. Magami, eager to spread the story of the early link between California and Japan, also honors his great-grandfather who cherished and taught what Magami calls “the way of tea” in Fukushima.

When that prefecture was so severely damaged by an earthquake and the resulting nuclear accident in 2011, Magami resolved to do what he could to preserve Fukushima’s and his ancestors’ tea tradition.

His interest in the short-lived Wakamatsu Colony took him to the Golden Feather in Butte County, where grower Mike Fritz’s trees were believed to share the seeds of Wakamatsu imports. In 2017 Magami planted 100 tea trees in a Napa Valley field. The following year he picked small amounts and drank the new tea, tasting, as he wrote “the dream tea of Wakamatsu.”

But the owner of his rented “field of dreams” sold the farm. Seeking a new home for his project, Magami learned of Paradise Ridge.

It was the story of Kanaye Nagasawa that brought Magami to Santa Rosa. The Kagoshima samurai was an earlier immigrant to this country than the Wakamatsu 22. He had arrived in New York State in 1861 as a follower of a persuasive preacher named Thomas Lake Harris who was building a Utopian community called the Brotherhood of the New Life — a kind of way station for pilgrims en route to his “Celestial Kingdom.”

When Nagasawa and Harris got off the train in Santa Rosa in 1875 they had come to build a new Brotherhood “Home Centre” which Harris called Fountaingrove. And. not at all incidentally, they came to plant a large vineyard and produce some of 19th century California’s most acclaimed vintages.

It is not surprising that the few Japanese immigrants in those early years, including at least one of the original Wakamatsu tea planters who had not returned to Japan, would work for Nagasawa at Fountaingrove.

While Harris’s Utopian experiment faltered over scandal in the 1890s and he left Sonoma County never to return, Nagasawa stayed on as manager and winemaker of the ranch until his death in 1934.

He was honored in Japan as the “Wine King of California,” and Santa Rosa has recognized his importance as well. There is a bronze likeness of him in a prominent spot in City Hall and a park named in his honor near the top of the Fountaingrove Parkway.

His story has also been the catalyst for a strong connection with his native Kagoshima and the establishment of a proactive student exchange program in Santa Rosa.

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The “Friends of Kagoshima” members were in evidence last week at Paradise Ridge when Magami gathered half a hundred or so interested parties to witness the dedication of his latest attempt to keep the living history of the Wakamatsu colony alive in productive tea plantings.

Magami chose Paradise Ridge because it shares a border with the former Fountaingrove community and vineyard and because retired radiologist Dr. Walter Byck and his family, who are the owners of Paradise Ridge, have been proactive at keeping Nagasawa’s legacy alive ever since their winery first opened in 1994.

The late Marijka Byck, wife and mother of the present owners, assembled a small museum on a lower floor of the first tasting room telling Nagasawa’s story. That museum — and the rest of the Paradise Ridge buildings burned in the Tubbs fire of 2017. The only remnant of that Fountaingrove collection was his samurai sword, found in the charred ashes. It is now displayed predominantly once more a “new” Nagasawa museum in the rebuilt tasting room, made possible by contributions from the Museum of Sonoma County’s Fountaingrove collection.

Knowing all that, if you are planting tea trees to keep Japanese immigrant history alive, where else would you go?

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Paradise Ridge may be the ultimate “good neighbor.” Risen from the ashes, the hillside vineyard with its spectacular sunset views has dedicated itself not only to the fruit of the vine and the unique history of the old Fountaingrove, but also to creativity of Sonoma County artists.

The oaks of the hillsides and the craggy canyons lend themselves to versatility and that’s what the Bycks specialize in. It’s an ideal artist’s venue. There are large — giant, even — sculptures at every turn of the entrance road, close up and far away, each one offering an artist’s concept of what belongs in that space. And there always seems to be room for something new. The former tennis courts have become an outdoor venue for music and social gatherings. There are even hints that there might be an outdoor ice show in the future.

You think that sounds impossible but then you learn about Burning Man — the new model of the giant wooden effigy (some have been as tall as 105 feet) which will be the centerpiece of the next yearly gathering in the Nevada desert — is to be constructed, I am told, in a far corner of the Paradise Ridge property.

Once completed this cultural icon will be transported to the desert site when literally thousands of artists and art lovers and a goodly portion of leftover hippies assemble once again — there were more than 75,000 in 2019.

Add up all these ventures — but don’t forget the wine and vines. And who can be surprised by a small grove of tea trees.

Not I.