Create your own tea garden

WHILE watching my family foraging for what they call ‘garden tea’, I realised that our fenced potager-style kitchen plot also serves us well as a tea garden. When we first moved here and made this productive space, my late father grew crops allotment-style. Since then, it has gradually filled with fruit trees, herbs and other edible plants with crops grown in the gaps left between. So what is this ‘garden tea’ and can anyone grow it?

The proper name for herbal teas fresh or dried is a tisane. What we refer to as ‘garden tea’ is the leaves and flowers from a range of plants, including what some folk would call weeds, gathered, a Chinese evergreen shrub related to the showy camellias grown for their flowers.