It took less than 10 minutes for Mike and Donna Fritts to lose everything.

From the moment Donna opened the garage door of their house in Concow (Butte County), just over the ridge from Paradise, only to spot treetop-high flames flowing down the ridge, they knew the fire was coming for them, and fast. Mike and Donna grabbed a few legal documents from their small home. They called Mike’s son to warn him to get out of town, crammed three large dogs into their Subaru and ripped out onto Concow Road.

Ten minutes was too fast to warn their neighbors. Too fast to hose down the house and grounds. Too fast, even, to grab the remaining stock of Mike Fritts’ teas, which represented eight years of labor.

By the time the Frittses drove into Oroville, 25 miles south of their house, the Camp Fire had inhaled California’s first commercial tea farm.

At least as far as they knew.

Growing tea hadn’t just been a hobby or a profession for Mike Fritts, 63. It was a sort of cure, he says.

Before the day in 2010 when Fritts started hallucinating, he had spent most of his life — the majority of it in the Sierra Foothills — working with plants as an independent horticulturalist and landscaper. The work had made him wiry and strong, turned his hands into blocks of stone-hard skin and burnished his face. So he wasn’t sure why he woke up woozy. “Things were wavy. I couldn’t see straight,” he says. “So I laid down. I was nauseous.” He had trouble getting up.

Eventually, the doctor traced the sickness to a tick bite, perhaps a series of them. Mike tested positive for Lyme disease as well as a few co-infections. It had colonized his brain as well as his body.

Lyme left him so addled and weak that he was forced to quit his job working out of Mendon’s Nursery in Paradise to focus on getting better. He and Donna, who had married that year, lived on a 1-acre plot in a sort of rural subdivision in Concow called Camelot Park, surrounded by wood-frame houses and mobile homes on similar-size plots. A stream divided a sunny western strip of pasture from the other four-fifths of the Fritts’ property, which was shaded by tall Ponderosa pines, cedars and oaks. The neighborhood was far from prosperous.

But the area had good soil, decomposed granite and forest humus, and ample water. A forest fire had clambered through the development in 2008, clearing a jagged path, so the couple, like their neighbors, kept the underbrush cleared.

Fritts chafed at the way his illness kept him inside. While shuttling from doctor to naturopath in 2010, he stopped by his old nursery and noticed that rows of small Camellia sinensis sinensis cuttings — tea plants — were on sale. Mendon’s had purchased them from a Southern California nursery famous for its camellias. Fritts knew that his land had acidic soil, which camellias love, and he was curious whether these might flourish on his property.

“I had to find something else to do, and tea plants were giving me a reason to go outdoors,” he says. “I started researching deeply into the tea, and finding the history of the tea and its medicinal benefits and what I can do to heal naturally from Lyme.”

So he planted the cuttings alongside the house and lavished his decades of experience on his tiny plantation. He fed them a little organic fertilizer from time to time — “any amount of poison in tea is not pure tea,” he says of pesticides — and irrigated them parsimoniously so their tap roots would plunge deep to seek out groundwater. He pruned each bush enough so that it fleshed out as it grew. He calls his approach to farming “pre-industrial.”

“I have kind of a druid mind-set with the land,” Fritts says. “I want to protect the trees, I want to protect the earth, the bugs and everything that is part of nature before we came in and started moving it around.”

After three years, the first of his tea bushes were about a foot and a half tall, dense with small leaves, and ready to pick.

Fritts has this theory — which he’s unable to substantiate until he submits his tea plants for genetic testing — that his plants are the direct descendants of the very first crop brought over from Japan.

In 1869, a group of Japanese settlers seeking respite from political turmoil arrived in California, led by a Prussian diplomat named John Henry Schnell, who had married into a samurai family. The group brought mulberry saplings, silkworms and tea seeds, and bought 200 acres near Placerville (El Dorado County) to establish the Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Farm Colony, the first Japanese settlement on the U.S. mainland.

The next year, the colonists displayed tea seedlings in Sacramento, and Fritts says he has found documentation that Schnell sold tea plants in the Bay Area, though all his research was consumed in the fire.

According to the American River Conservatory, which maintains Wakamatsu as a landmark farm, all of the colony’s known tea plants died soon after 1870, killed by irrigation water contaminated by nearby mining operations. The docents have scoured the property and surrounding land for any remaining Camellia sinensis. They have spied a few old mulberry trees in the region. But tea plants have yet to be found.

Just two decades before the Wakamatsu settlers landed in San Francisco, British botanist and horticultural spy Robert Fortune smuggled tea seeds and seedlings from China, where the species originates, to the highlands of India. From there, tea plantations — most of which produce mass-market black tea — spread to Africa and Central Asia.

A few plants made their way to Charleston, S.C., in 1888, but with the exception of one plantation, now owned by Bigelow, tea cultivation never took hold in North America. “If you look at highlands of Sri Lanka or South India, tea tends to have the highest quality where it’s high elevation, usually between the tropics, because tea doesn’t withstand frost, needs 50 inches of rain a year, and prefers an acid soil,” says Peter Goggi, president of the Tea Association of the USA. “The actual best places for growing tea in the United States as compared to those terroirs is kind of difficult to come by.”

Smaller efforts, barely a few steps above the hobbyist level, have appeared since the turn of the millennium. Hawaii, with its tropical climate and strong Asian American presence, sees the most activity, but there are decade-old farms in Oregon and Washington state. Roy Fong, owner of the Imperial Tea Court, has planted several acres in Yolo County, although his farm, beset by troubles, has not yet produced a commercial crop.

What Mike Fritts didn’t know in 2010 — what almost everyone had forgotten, in fact — was that the UC Extension Service planted California’s first modern test plot of Camellia sinensis in Fresno in the 1960s, when it partnered with Lipton.

Jacquelyn Gervay Hague, a chemist at UC Davis who conducts studies of tea-growing in Taiwan and is active in the university’s Global Tea Initiative, said she learned about the plots just a few years ago when the director of UC Extension’s Fresno office gave her a call.

“It blew my mind,” Hague says. She pored over the records, which covered 1963 to the early 1980s, when Lipton pulled out of the study. “It was concluded that we could grow tea very well,” she said.

“We decided after reading all the information that we should try this again,” she added. “It’s now the 21st century and things are different.” She began collecting cultivars from around the country to plant in Fresno, including a few from Mike Fritts.

When she visited Fritts’ farm, Hague was struck by how much the Sierra foothills around his house reminded her of Taiwan’s top plantations: the earth, the rain, the elevation. “It’s really a prime area for growing tea,” she says.

The other cause for her excitement: tasting Golden Feather’s tea.

In 2014, Joachim Hansen, a former Blue Bottle barista who had just taken on coffee service for Lazy Bear as the restaurant opened in the Mission District, was searching online for U.S. teas to add to the restaurant’s menu. He spotted a mention of Golden Feather Tea in the comments section of the Global Tea Initiative’s website. Hansen did some “deep Googling,” came up with a phone number and drove up to Concow to meet Fritts, who had just begun to harvest enough tea to sell.

Hansen drove back to his boss, chef-owner David Barzelay, with a pitch that was almost ludicrous. “There’s this fantastically expensive tea that’s being grown up in the Sierras,” Barzelay remembers Hansen telling him. “We have to drive up there to get it. He won’t ship it.” Not only that, they would have to buy all of Fritts’ stock — a pound or two, max, a year — and it would cost them several thousand dollars up front.

Barzelay rolled his eyes at the story of Golden Feather’s 19th century samurai origins, but he loved the idea of serving the only tea on the market grown in California, as far as any of them knew. What a story to share with guests! Barzelay says.

That is how, five years after planting a few bushes, Mike Fritts found himself the exclusive tea supplier to a Michelin-starred restaurant.

What is remarkable about Fritts’ rapid success isn’t just that he had taught himself from books and websites to grow tea plants, figuring out on his own when to pick the new leaves as the bushes flushed, starting in the late spring and going through the fall.

Even more improbable, Fritts read a few online instructions on how to make oolong teas — withering, rolling and drying the leaves in a complex series of steps — and gave it a go, with no idea he had settled on the most technically difficult style of tea to make, a process that takes Chinese and Taiwanese tea masters decades to perfect.

No, what’s remarkable about Golden Feather Tea was that that this tea was good.

“It reminded me of the Sierras. It’s got that forest floor-ness. In terms of flavor profile, this really sweet squash, along with forest floor and fall earthy notes to it,” Hansen says. Golden Feather’s tea is more like a lighter white tea than a Taiwanese high mountain oolong, he clarifies. “But there’s a depth of flavor and a balance to it that I think everyone was really struck by.”

Nami Thompson, owner of the Tea Cozy in Sacramento, which obtained a small amount of Golden Feather Tea’s oolong and sells it for $200 an ounce, echoes Hansen’s comments. “It absorbs the aroma and taste of pine, and it’s a little peppery tasting,” she says. “It was different from anything I had had before.”

“This isn’t going to be very scientific,” says UC Davis scientist Hague, “but I think Michael makes Michael’s tea special because he cares so much for his plants.”

By 2018, Golden Feather Tea hadn’t just saved Mike Fritts’ life — his Lyme disease was largely in remission, though he was still beset by the occasional attack. Tea had become his future. He bought more cuttings, and the curving rows in the tiny plantation soon stretched back toward the hills. More plants filled in the former pasture land across the creek. Eight hundred in all.

At the same time, Fritts attended meetings at the Global Tea Initiative and the U.S. League of Tea Growers. For the first time in his life, he had started using a computer and set up a Facebook page. “I was very fortunate to get where I am and get involved with a lot of people around the world in the tea industry,” he says. “I want to say it’s a movement. It’s kind of a soft movement, because it’s passionate about the culture around tea.”

The Northern California tea community is small and thirsty for company. Strangers found his Facebook page and asked if they could visit — most of the American-born enthusiasts had never seen tea plants in the ground before. Fritts met farmers from China and India. From tea lovers, the savant also learned how to brew and taste his teas in new ways, and how to compare them to others.

In 2017, he built a small barn in which to process his teas and host gongfu-style tastings, referring to the Chinese and Taiwanese manner of brewing tea in many quick infusions to reveal its complexities. “We’d be sitting there and, before we knew it, five hours had come and gone,” he says. “That’s the way tea is. You start meditating on tea and friendship. Tea unites people.”

Fritts pitched people on the idea of investing in the company and expanding Golden Feather Tea. Barzelay turned him down, but a few neighbors showed interest in planting tea on their property, and Fritts cultivated seedlings to sell to them. He fantasized about passing his 1-acre property on to a younger farmer and moving someplace more remote, farther from his neighbors.

Then the fire came through, and Mike Fritts had to leave it all behind.

Mike and Donna Fritts spent a week and a half sleeping in their Subaru with their three dogs before friends of Mike’s daughter let the couple move into their cabin in Feather Falls, one hour away. They filed an insurance claim, and learned that they were fortunate: They were fully covered.

Then, banned from visiting their property because of safety concerns, they waited to see what had become of it.

In the meantime, James Erb, who runs a small tea company called American Gongfu, came across a news story about the loss of Golden Feather’s farm. Though he had never met Fritts in person, he reached out to the farmer, then to Northern California vendors, to set up a benefit auction. Some donated expensive teas, others tea wares. Barzelay donated dinner for two at Lazy Bear. Nami Thompson offered up a tasting of a few remaining grams of Golden Feather oolong. “The tea community, the gongfu people, is a tight-knit community and a generous community,” Erb says.

The auction raised a couple thousand dollars, but just as significantly, it put the word out on social media: California’s first commercial tea farm was gone.

It took a month for the state to allow residents of Camelot Park to return to their land. The Frittses drove around hills once covered in pine where now machines were chewing up thick trunks and spitting out shavings. A burned-out car marked the entrance to their road. Their front fence was intact, but most of the structures behind it had been leveled. The house: gone. The tea barn: gone. The chicken coop: Well, the fire had swerved around that.

All of Fritts’ beautiful tea plants were charred, their trunks cooked. But when he began trimming off the dead branches, green appeared. Some even sprouted white flowers. He eventually determined 200 had survived the fire. Within the week, the deer discovered the tea plants, though, and nibbled away most of the remaining leaves.

Mike and Donna started a new routine: They return to their land to clear away some of the muck and tend to what is left. They bring food for the deer every day, and not just because it will keep the animals away from the plants. Members of the tea community have organized work parties to help fertilize the remaining plants.

“I’m grateful that I can get up here every day because I just can’t see sitting around, idle,” he says.

Early in March, the state gave them the final clearance to demolish the remaining foundation and rebuild. Now he’s just waiting for the spring flush to see which plants the winter rains have brought back to life.

Despite the fact that three-fourths of his plantation might be gone, the fire set Golden Feather’s plans back only three to five years. Mike and Donna plan to build a tiny house on the property. This time, though, they will not connect to the power grid — Mike refuses to give PG&E any of his money, or even to say the company’s name. The Frittses don’t think many of their neighbors will return. Camelot Park may become a back-to-the-land paradise.

“I look at the fire as a purification of the environment,” he says.

In fact, Mike Fritts’ property has been cleansed by two fires in a decade, and yet he’s certain that means it won’t happen again for years. It’s hard to know whether his optimism is stubborn, or naive, or born of his intimacy with the land around him. “The land is perfect and prime,” he says, “and ready for planting tea.”

Jonathan Kauffman is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jkauffman@sfchronicle.com. Twitter/Instagram: @jonkauffman