Worth Sharing This Week: Tea, Anyone?

If you are cold, tea will warm you; if you are too heated, it will cool you; if you are depressed, it will cheer you; if you are excited, it will calm you. -William Ewart Gladstone

In January, I purposely choose to drink tea, temporarily giving coffee a rest. I find I'm quite liking it and while it was meant to be a discipline for me, it's not such a terrible hard one, after all.

Truth is I came late to drinking hot tea.  It took a little getting used to but as I said, my third year in and I find it's really not that difficult to embrace this month or so of hot tea.



I grew up here in the middle of Georgia, where tea drinking was relegated to sweet iced tea.  Iced tea was NEVER out of season.  We drank it just as much in December and January as we did in July and August.  We drank it with our summer lunch time sandwiches and with our winter soup suppers.   In my childhood home, we made a fresh gallon of sweetened tea every single day without fail.  It wasn't until I  left home that I stopped making iced tea and as I grew older I found 'sweet tea' more and more unpalatable.   About ten years ago, a friend ordered a glass of 'half and half tea' at a restaurant  and I discovered that I liked that rather well.  Half a glass of unsweetened tea mixed with half a glass of sweet tea worked okay for me.  But it was still a sweet drink and if I was going to have a sweet drink I'd really rather have my calories in a fizzy glass of soda.

I usually drink water, by the way, as a drink of choice with any meal but breakfast.  I was drinking water years upon years before it was fashionable, long before some smart entrepreneur realized that you couldn't just walk into a store and buy a bottle of water even if it was what you most wanted.   I won't even tell you of the fight I had with a fast food establishment employee because I asked for a glass of water which she refused to give or sell to me!   People say it's a waste of money to buy bottled water and I will agree that if you're at home and have a tap you might as well just get your glass and fill it up right there.  But away from home, water is the drink of choice for me and I'm grateful to the man or woman who decided somebody else just might be willing to cough up a buck or two for a bottle of water when they were thirsty on a hot day.  But we were discussing tea, weren't we?

                                                      Charles Bittinger "Afternoon Tea"



In 2015 when  I was in the hospital I was brought a small glass of iced tea daily with my noon and evening meals.  It was unsweetened.  I loathe artificial sweeteners for the side effects I often experience from them.  Even Stevia is unpleasant for me as I have an allergy to it.  I was out of water that particular day and the nurse's aid who generally supplied me with two cups between breakfast and lunch and two more after lunch was not at work.  I was terribly thirsty and so I drank the unsweetened iced tea and was pleasantly surprised that I could actually taste the flavor of the tea.   It was good!   All I'd ever tasted before was the syrupy sweetness of it.

But hot tea wasn't something I drank at all.  I have always said I'm  sure it was mostly psychological.  In making that gallon of sweet tea daily, I'd take a teaspoon and taste it to see if I'd gotten enough sugar in it.  When I did this at Granny and Grandmother's both would say "Oh Terri, don't drink that HOT tea!  It'll make you sick!"  And indeed I did often feel a bit queasy after tasting that warm tea.   I never knew a single family member to drink a cup of hot tea.

Then  I had children.  For some reason, all three of my children requested (when quite young) that I make them a cup of hot tea when they felt unwell.  I can only blame it on the fact that I read so many English novels during my pregnancies in which hot tea always played such a prominent role.  For the children, I'd make cambric tea when they were younger and stronger cups of black tea with less milk as they got older.  But I myself never touched the stuff.

Did you know that January is designated as Hot Tea month?  I didn't until I went to a website I'd saved in order to view their luxurious tea blends.   I love these two sites Harney & Sons and The Republic of Tea.  Both  have blogs, news, accessories...but The Republic of Tea site has a whole collection of Downtown Abbey inspired teas.  Their latest is Mrs. Patmore's Pudding...Now wouldn't it be lovely to settle down with a cup of that while you're watching an episode of the show? 

This was a lovely post on the Harney & Sons site about relishing that cup of hot tea.

Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

If I thought it sweet that John would set up the coffeemaker with one of my pretty cups waiting for me each morning, it's nothing at all to the downright romantic feeling I get when I walk into the kitchen and he's pouring boiling water into my pretty teapot and popping in two bags of English Breakfast tea.  He then wraps it with a pretty towel to keep it hot while the tea steeps.  Y'all, the man is a for sure keeper!   And he's pointed up a want for pretty tea towels...



Tea was first cultivated in China and later was brought to Japan at the Emperor Saga's request.   Eventually The Dutch brought it to Holland and it soon was popular in France and England.  Naturally tea was brought to America by British settlers.

I'd never seen a tea plant so looked it up.  The plant which produces tea is called Camellia Sinesis.  

Here in the south we have Camellia plants which produce lovely flowers each winter.  I wondered if they were kin to the tea camellia and they are.

The flowers are showy and the leaves waxy.  The plants have no scent at all...I always thought it a disappointed that such a beautiful flower would have no scent, and honestly from a family known for it's fragrant leaves you'd think something of it might have been imparted to the flowers wouldn't you?

The American Camellia Society is within easy riding distance from us, perhaps 20 minutes.  Katie and I used to visit the Massee Lane gardens periodically, sometimes around Christmas and then later when the camellias were blooming.  

In looking for artwork for this portion of this post I was struck by how often the artwork containing an afternoon or morning tea ritual also portrays women.  It is not that tea is a strictly feminine drink.  In Britain, tea is coveted by all...but in art, it is a feminine drink.

Surely a pretty woman never looks prettier than when making tea. -Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Reading tea leaves became a popular form of fortune telling.  In the 1800's it wasn't uncommon for the Romany wanderers to  read tea leaves, often for housemaids or romantic young women.   This practice has continued for many years.  It is to a fortune teller who reads tea leaves that Rose Zimmerman goes when she is desperate to have her daughter's (Midge Maizel) marriage healed.

Here's a lovely painting from 1906 of a fortune teller reading leaves for a young woman.

                                                             by Harry Herman Roseland

and another by William McGregor Paxton, painted in 1909:  

The art of reading tea leaves is called Tasseography and has an outlined method and standard symbols it relies upon to tell your fortune.  One would read the white spaces between the dark tea leaves, looking for the good fortune to be told rather than reading the symbols in the dark leaves which signified the misfortunes coming.   

I lean just as heavily upon British television as I do upon English novels...So I have to share this one observation that John and I have made as we watch different dramas, be they period pieces or more modern day programs.  In watching American television programs you can see clearly that coffee or tea is a cursory prop and nothing more.  How often does a waitress or the one serving a hot drink, pour a bitter half cup of something into a cup which the actor never touches?  But in British programming, when  a cup of tea is poured they fill the cup right up to the top and what's more, it's steaming hot.  They get a proper cup of tea and every actor or actress immediately takes it up and sips.  Everything else might be a pretense but that cup of hot tea is real!


Years ago when I was a prone to playing the piano for contemplation as well as fun, Granny gifted me a Reader's Digest songbook.  It had this lovely little song included, Tea for Two.  I'm including the link to a Doris Day cover of the song.  It's a sweetly romantic song that captured my imagination way back in my pre-teen years and hasn't left me since.

There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. Henry James


A new remake of  "Little Women"  has come to the movie theatres.  I confess I have my favorite movie version and it happens to be the one with June Allyson as Jo and Elizabeth Taylor as Amy which was directed by Mervyn LeRoy in 1949.   I've always thought June Allyson was a perfect Jo.  She had a spunkiness I admired terribly.   The latest film is told in a retrospective manner, as Jo March looks back.  Nothing quite touches the lovely sweetness of the book and though it is my understanding that it wasn't the book Miss Alcott most wanted to write, I'm very grateful that she did and that the book continues to stand the test of time and theatre so many years later.  

I have to share that my most favorite of her books isn't Little Women, but An Old Fashioned Girl.   I'm rather fond of Eight Cousins and Rose In Bloom.  

By the way, have any of you seen PBS's  "Louisa May Alcott, the Woman Behind Little Women"?  It's on Prime and well worth watching.  I learned so much I never knew about Louisa Alcott and liked her the better for it.   





I went to an estate sale on Friday.  It's half nosiness as much as the desire to add to my own treasures at home that sends me trotting off to these estate sales.   A home reveals so much about the people who lived there and so I go to discover people.   I truly do believe that homes have personalities as much as people do.  It's why we know, when we walk into a house that this is the one, the one where we can live.  John and I looked over mobile homes long before we bought our own and we actually picked out this very floor plan four years before we found this house.  Four years!  Intuition perhaps of a home where we might be happy?

Well, I didn't get to discover much about the house itself this time.  The estate sale was limited to a sunroom, a garage shed and a carport.   The yard was neat as a pin and the garage and carport looked as though they'd never seen a spot of grease.   The gentleman of the house worked with his hands but he was meticulous about his work.  The yard, the small vineyard and the garden area, the garage shed and the few tools on display for sale were all fastidiously clean and neat, as was the concrete work done in the drive and patios and garage shed.  I wondered briefly at a small clump of daffodils that dared to come up in front of a gate to the back yard.  I'm sure the man of the house wouldn't have approved and a squirrel most undoubtedly planted those bulbs there...

I was disappointed just at first but the ladies running the sale assured me that there was 'pretty feminine stuff' in the sunroom.

I can tell you something of the lady of the house.  She loved birds and autumn.  This was evidenced by a variety of bird figurines, bird cages and Fall wreaths and Fall foliage arrangements.  I'd say she was a craftswoman as well.   There were sewing machines, handmade wreaths likely made from the prunings of her own grapevines and a few pieces of hand painted pottery.  She obviously spent many a summer putting up her garden harvest, based upon the many dozens of canning jars upon the shelves of the shed.  There wasn't a great deal I felt was treasure.

I came home with two lovely florals though one was a bit dated with it's hunter green and maroon matting.  I was very pleased when I removed the backing to clean the glass and discovered that the matting was not attached to the picture and what was behind was something far more suited to me. 


That pansy is in a pretty teacup.   And by the way that picture has since been moved.  The wall isn't exactly right just yet but I've determined what needs to be adjusted there and will work on it.



I'd just bought pansies on Wednesday which I planted on Thursday.   No wonder that pretty pansy picture caught my eye!   I'd contemplated going without planting them this year but as I walked into the discount grocery there were flats of them and one pretty yellow and purple faced beauty nodded at me and that was it...I was buying pansies.   They're flourishing thanks to the warm and damp weather we're having.

Back to Little Women once again...Did you ever wonder what flower Beth embroidered on the slippers she gave Mr. Laurence as thanks for the piano?  Heartease...Viola which is a relative to the hybrid Pansy.   We have something here in the very early days of spring that my former mother in law used to call "Johnny jump-ups" which are wild violas.

Personally speaking, Pansies and I have a shorter history but I've loved them for the longest time.  It wasn't until I was in my 50's that I began planting them about my house.  For our area, they suit the winter and early spring months best and if we've a mild winter they bloom incredibly well. I love the slight floral scent they put off as well.  The name "Pansy" comes from the French word, pensee, meaning 'thought' and was imported as  Middle English name as the British said the flower was a symbol for remembrance.

These flowers were initially bred in 1800s in England from a variety of crosses of violas.  Eventually the dark blotch or face that spread across some of the petals made it a very popular flower for florists and was sold in bunches, as were violets.