The Tea Pea, also called Coleraine Tea Pea or by its Ulster Scots name Tay Pea, is a small-podded smooth-seeded green pea that has been grown in the area around Coleraine, County Londonderry, since at least the late eighteenth century.
It is not a particularly distinguished pea by modern standards. The pods are short, three to four inches, holding five or six small seeds. The vines grow to about four feet and want a brushy support. The flavour is good but not extraordinary. What makes the Tea Pea worth writing about is that it nearly disappeared, and the manner of its survival is instructive.
Tristan Aoki, who edits this section from Kyoto, first encountered the Tea Pea through a 2024 catalogue from the Irish Seed Savers Association at Capparoe, where it was listed as accession ISSA-1147 with a one-line note: recovered 1991 from a single family in Articlave, parentage uncertain. He grew it for the first time in 2025 from seed sent to him by an exchange contact in County Down.
The family in question is the Macready family. The grower who kept the line, Mr. Daniel Macready, was born in 1924 and farmed a small holding outside the village of Articlave, about four miles from Coleraine, from his marriage in 1949 until his retirement in 1989. He kept a vegetable garden of perhaps a quarter-acre and saved seed of three varieties continuously: the Tea Pea, a local broad bean called Bann Valley, and a leek selected by his grandfather sometime in the 1880s.
The Tea Pea had been in his family at least four generations before him. He had no documented provenance. His mother, born in 1898, had grown it from her mother's seed and remembered her grandmother growing it before that. The line therefore extends backward, by oral tradition, to approximately the 1850s and likely earlier.
By the 1980s Mr. Macready was the last grower of the variety in the Coleraine area. The Bann Valley bean and the Macready leek were already gone, having been lost when his older brother, who had also grown them, died in 1981. Mr. Macready himself fell seriously ill in 1989. He retained perhaps three pints of Tea Pea seed in a sealed glass jar in his pantry.
He gave the jar to a niece, Eileen Macready Burns, in late 1989, with instructions to keep the line going. Mrs. Burns was a primary school teacher in Coleraine, not a gardener, but she grew the peas in her back garden in 1990 and saved seed.
The 1991 recovery referred to in the Irish Seed Savers note came when Mrs. Burns wrote to the newly formed ISSA, asking whether they would be interested in the line. They were. She sent them roughly two pints of seed, retaining enough to continue growing the pea herself.
The ISSA increased the seed over the next three seasons at Capparoe under their standard isolation protocols. By 1995 the variety was in their public catalogue and being grown by perhaps fifty home gardeners across Ireland. By 2010 the count was several hundred. By 2026 the Tea Pea is in the catalogues of the Irish Seed Savers, the Heritage Seed Library in Coventry, the Hudson Valley Seed Company in New York, and at least three smaller exchanges.
Mrs. Burns died in 2018. Her own seed line, which had run in parallel to the ISSA line for twenty-seven years, was inherited by her daughter Sinead, who lives in Belfast and continues to grow the pea each year in a small allotment off the Ormeau Road.
Aoki spent four days in Northern Ireland in October 2025 to walk the Articlave area and speak with Sinead Burns. The Macready family farm is no longer in the family, having been sold in 1992 after Mr. Macready's death. The land is now part of a larger holding and is in barley.
The Articlave village pump, beside which Mr. Macready waited for the schoolbus as a child, is still there. The Presbyterian meeting-house where his funeral was held is still in use. Mrs. Burns showed Aoki the back garden where her mother grew the first post-recovery crop of Tea Peas in 1990. The garden is now mostly lawn.
She also showed him her own current crop of Tea Peas, growing on a brushwood frame at her allotment, in their thirty-sixth post-recovery generation. The plants looked, to Aoki's eye, identical to the photograph her mother had taken in 1990 and pasted into the family Bible.
The genetic stability of the Tea Pea over thirty-six generations of small-scale growing is itself worth noting. Peas are self-pollinating, which protects against drift from chance crosses. But selection pressure from individual growers can shift a line within a decade. The ISSA grow-outs and the Burns family grow-outs have, by mutual agreement, used the same selection criteria: small pod, smooth seed, four-foot vine, mid-season ripening.
Aoki brought back seed from Mrs. Burns and from a separate grower he met at an ISSA open day in Capparoe. He grew both lines in 2025 in adjacent plots in Kyoto and found them indistinguishable in growth habit and pod morphology. The flavour, as best he could tell, was identical.
The pea is not currently in commercial production. Its small pods make it uneconomic for fresh market sale, and its smooth seed makes it less desirable than wrinkled-seed varieties for the home gardener. It survives because gardeners in three countries have agreed, without any central coordination, to keep growing it.
Aoki estimates the total annual harvest of Tea Pea seed across all known growers at perhaps fifteen kilograms. The variety is therefore not in any immediate danger of being lost again, but it is also not in any sense secure. A single bad season for the major exchanges, combined with a single bad season for the family line, would put it back where it was in 1989.
The Macready leek, by contrast, has not been recovered. Several Articlave residents Aoki spoke to remembered eating it. None had saved seed.
The Bann Valley bean has been recovered, in a way. A grower in Castlerock, sixteen miles from Articlave, came forward in 2007 with a broad bean line that her grandmother had grown and that she believed was the same variety. The DNA work that would confirm or rule out the match has not been done. The bean is now in the ISSA catalogue under the provisional accession ISSA-1402.
Aoki keeps a small notebook for each line he grows. The Tea Pea page now has two years of entries. The handwriting is in pencil, in English, with the variety name written also in Irish: Pis Tae Chuil Raithin. The seed for 2027 is already in a labelled paper envelope on his cool pantry shelf in Kyoto, twenty grams, more than enough for next year and the year after.
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