Gardening notebook
Time for a tea party!
Parties held aboard sailing vessels amidst the bustle and noise of docks at Shanghai and London in the 19th century would seem to have little connection with plants, but it was on these ships and on these docks that tea, made from the leaves of the camellia shrub, decided whether fortunes were made or lost.
This was the era of the tea trade and of Chinese clippers racing each other around the tip of Africa to be the first to deliver the cargo of the season.
When several clippers arrived at their final destination at the same time, the price of tea dropped dramatically, and a drink that only the wealthy could previously afford became available to the masses. The coffee houses of London became tea rooms where famous poets and writers of the day gathered over a ‘dish’ of tea. As poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson put it: “There is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea.”
The camellia with the greatest economic, its glossy leaves and leaf buds used to produce tea.
