A TIME FOR TEA WATER
Rex Burress
You wonder what cultivated crop will be introduced to Butte County, California next. One of the most recent conversion projects is an attempt to grow specialty tea in Concow, as was explained in the June 4, 2016 Mercury-Register.
The subject of growing tea is a rather welcome relief from all the marijuana-growing issues that non-smoking residents have been burdened with in recent times, but the overall consideration about any kind of planting is the amount of total water it will consume on its way to maturity. That especially applies to drought conditions in spite of a politician's denial of a drought in California! Resident people and plants know better!
The non-food type of plants--coffee, tea, wine--require extensive water from conception through growth through processing to market. In a round-about way, tea, as transported by Britain across the watery Atlantic to American colonists, also required extensive water, not only for the transporting ship, but as a place to dump tea as at the Boston Tea Party in 1773. You remember the Tea Party don't you--the Republican Tea Party of 2016?
The importance of tea in society was emphasized recently by my granddaughter Maya. We were making some tea for lunch when I, as I usually do, popped the water into the microwave, and my little active tea- lover cried, “Oh no, Gpa, the water must be heated on the stove before being seeped properly; to do otherwise is sacrilege!” However, overly boiled water can remove oxygen that helps flavor tea. Have you ever tasted properly prepared tea? What is proper?
It seems that ceremonies are an important part of tasting tea to some people a la Japanese style, or like the afternoon British tea time. Slowing up to savor tea is a commendable trait in a society often prone to acceleration, yet, how many carry a thermos of tea to settle down to by the river for a moment of mediation. Coffee and bottled water seem to reign as picnic regulars, but tea made from the Camellia sinensis shrub is claimed to be, after water, the most widely consumed drink in the world. Most tea- leaves come from India and China that produces about half of the global four million tons sold annually and distributed in stores everywhere.
Lake Merritt in Oakland, CA is surrounded by the photogenic twistings of the Leptospermum tea tree, and Melaleuca bottlebrush supports a rookery of herons on the off-shore islands. Both plants are native to the Australian area and both are called 'tea trees' though more of a shrub. The Melaleuca alternifolia produces the medicinal Tea Tree Oil, while the 86 species of Leptospermum are also called tea trees, the name arising when Captain Cook's 1770 expedition used the leaves as tea to reduce scurvy on his ship.
Quaintly, the four main types of regular tea—black, green, white, yellow-- all come from the same C. sinensis plant. The difference is in the selection of quality leaves, processing, and the drying. C. sinensis does have caffeine, as much as 47 mg in black tea, compared to about 100 mg in a cup of coffee, unless you buy decaffeinated tea that has been treated with the chemical-solvent ethyl acetate. Pick your poison! Nearly all drinks have some kind of potential toxin or contaminate--and even plain tap water often has chlorine and fluorite additives. Even an idyllic-looking stream in the wilderness may carry bacteria. “Water isn't water anymore.”
Finding a good spring often can really be considered a “fountain of youth!” I know of one hallowed spot in the Mayacama Mountains, where a spring bubbles out of the rocky slope onto a shelf of madrone trees, and that cold pure water is rejuvenating--indeed a place of paradise. What wondrous tea that water must make!
One of the health rages is herbal tea, which is not actually tea in the traditional sense, but rather an uncaffeinated infusion properly called 'tisane,' made from a myriad of vascular plants. Nature walk interpreters can have a 'field' day pointing out medicinal and edible plants. The list is long of species able to cure many maladies or make into tea, but be sure of the identity and the proper preparation. Plants can also kill!
“I like the pause that tea allows.” --Waris Ahiuwalla
“The best quality tea must have creases like the leathern boot of Tartar horsemen, curl like the dewlap of a mighty bullock, unfold like a mist rising out of a ravine, gleam like a lake touched by a zephyr, and be wet and soft like a fine earth newly swept by rain.” --Lu Yu