Celebration Tea

It is a stunningly gorgeous morning.  The birds are singing, the sun is shining on rain sparkled flowers and it is cool!!!!!!  All my windows and doors are open to catch the breezes, the cats are stalking mice, the front garden smells delicious and the compost piles are cooking.  Asters and golden rod are carpeting the fields with purple and gold and my tomatoes are almost ripe enough to pick.  Hooray for today in all its glory!

I am celebrating with a special tea from Steepster.  It comes from Verdant Tea and is Laoshan Black tea.  This tea comes from the small 15 acre farm of the He family on Laoshan Mountain, which is already famous for their Laoshan Green tea.  The leaves are black , slender, twisted. Their dry aroma is first chocolate, then autumn forest, nuts and dry or drying leaves. 

I brew it for 3 minutes with boiling water.  The scent now has shifted to a strong, oakiness with some chocolate, but it is also sweet.  The liquor is a pale medium amber.  It feels silky and it has a rich, sweet taste of chocolate with an overlay of acorns and oak.  It's a lovely tea and I am going to get more.  This one is special.

Oh, speaking of acorns, we can also celebrate the summer acorn drop, which occurred this week.  That will make room for bigger ones in the fall.  it is not nearly as abundant as it was last year.  But this has been a drier and hotter summer, on the whole.

Tea Among the Beautiful

Today has been a day of visual and olfactory wonders.  It began with the utter stillness of the river mirroring the soft greens and silvers and whites of middle spring.  It was beautifully disturbed by a lone oarsman, sculling his way downriver, the sun glinting off his head.  There was pink honeysuckle blooming by the road side and further in,  wild dogwood was tracing its whiteness through the barely covered branches.  Then there were the lilacs, lovely purple and white pannicles scenting the air.  At home ours are still budding.  I can't wait for them to bloom, but meanwhile I am content with some white clover sweetening the morning and smiling at the lollipops of dandelion fuzz waiting to scatter.  A lovely morning.

My tea is quite nice, also, being Upton's China Pre Ching-Ming Golden Pekoe.  I use 2-3 teaspoons of these long slender buds/leaves per cup, meanwhile admiring the gold dust and the sweet, somewhat spicy, somewhat tobaccoey aroma .  I brew it boldly for 5 minutes with boiling water and I am rewarded with a lovely cup that is woodsy, sweet, delicate but strong.  It is smooth and delicious.  It goes very nicely either plain or with some milk.

This afternoon I had some Simpson and Vail's Rose-Kissed Jasmine.  This is one of my all time favorite green teas.  The jasmine is good quality and the rose kisses with it remind me of my favorite shrub, the Mock Orange, which will bloom soon.  It has always been wonderful, in my opinion.

I planted a strawberry tower this afternoon and decided where I want to plant my new daylilies and peonies.  Some of the former are fragrant.  One is a spider type.  That will go on the other side of the walk from the yellow spider I got last year.  It is a huge flower and really shines when it blooms.  I also got some cranesbill geraniums and some yellow creeping plant to go under the black leafed one I got last year.  I added two new colors to my miniature German bearded iris - NOT to be confused with miniature iris - a totally different plant.  Now all I really need are some Caesar's Brother iris and I am all set.  Well, the lavender for the new bed and the rose for its middle - Bright Corsair.

Mother's Day is coming, so I thought I would show you how one church in Forio, Ischia Island, Italy, decorated for their celebration of the day.  The statues have real hair.  This is the church with the pyramidal baptismal font I pictured a few days ago. We visited many churches in Forio, as that is the township Frank's grandfather came from.

Bohea For Me

There it is, the Swiss flag.

My, it has been an interesting day or two. Yesterday’s earthquake - ok, West Coasters, we’re wimps. Want a tornado? Hurricane? It did not get this far north. Only once have I experienced an earthquake and it was very mild and interesting.

Today Libyans are claiming their freedom. Yay Libya! Learn to govern well. I will toast them with tea!  And a good one it is, as the original tea called by this name was the tea the Colonists dumped in Boston Harbor in protest about “No taxation without representation”, the beginning of our struggles for freedom.   It is Bohea, which I believe is pronounced to rhyme with tea. At that time, it was quite cheap and  not of good quality. Not so today.



My particular cup is Bohea Imperial Organic, from Upton Teas, ZK72. It is a hand processed Congou from Fujian Province, China. The leaves are on the small side, very dark, twisted and smelling of smoke. Not as much as good Lapsang, but more than some may be comfortable with. I brewed it for 4.5 minutes with water at 212 degrees. A great deal of the smoke dissipated , leaving a clean milky aroma. The liquor is a pleasant medium amber.


Umm, what a good tasting tea. It is very mouth filling, smooth, with baked or roasted veggie elements. There is that hint of smoke, much modified from the aroma. There is also a hint of cocoa, in the way that cocoa often rounds out flavors. It actually is a rather delicate, rather than hearty tea, suitable for afternoon tea.  You might also try it with a bleu cheese, as I know Lapsang Souchang is good that way.


It is very windy today and I hear tell we may get a hurricane tail by Sunday. Last time that happened, I acquired my sweet Orphan Andy cat. The one before I had to grab my youngest as he sailed by, nearly blown off the porch.  We had no power for a week. One of our neighbors had a gas stove so our little cul-de-sac had a lot of communal meals. We all got together and played games and had a good time, since there wasn’t anything else we could do. I just hope we don’t lose any more trees. Enough already.

I Just Can't Bear It

There won't be any pictures until I can use my own computer, which will hopefully be Wednesday. The whole thing had to be taken off and reinstalled, which means that I need to re-install all my personal software as well. Not a happy camper.

The @#$%^*&*bear came back and made another mess with the bird feeders and suet. Then it was rude enough to poop in my yard. Usually it only comes once in spring and maybe once in the fall, just before hibernation. How did we get to be so lucky. Maybe the tornado upset it. I sure hope none of the squirrels got that strong!

Oh dear, I overcame all my taboos about vanilla in tea and tried some of Samovar's Vanilla Blossoming. I wish I hadn't. It smelled very, very strongly of vanilla and tasted very, very strongly of chemical vanilla. I hated it, my husband, who would use vanilla as aftershave if he could, loved it. Go figure.

However, I did have a pleasant experience with Life in Teacup's Red Tea Dan Cong. Dry, it had a sharp winey smell and huge, tightly twisted black leaves. As it brewed the aroma was some combination of Asian market, Chinese restaurant, Chinatown streets and incense. The flavor was just as nuanced and just as hard to pin down, some sort of cross between a heavy roasted Oolong and a mild Keemun. I drank 3 cups of it because I liked it and I wanted to pin down the flavor, but I couldn't.

I do like tea that is so intriguing.

The new Upton's catalogue has arrived and Miss Greedy Eyes here wants one of everything. But I satisfied myself with just the newest arrivals until this year's Keemuns and Yunnans come in.

That Was the Week That Was

Well, here I am again. My computer is still unwell, but I can use my husband's, as we finally got it back. I have been tea tasting in spite of how nuts it is around here. We all have a small freak out when the wind blows hard and stare at the sky, hoping this is just normal, The sound of power saws has been going on for days and it seems the more that is cleared, the more damage is revealed. But we all were truly fortunate in this freak occurrence. No one injured and fairly minor damage.




To add to the fun, I thought some quiet perennial planting would ease my mind. I forgot we have only3 inches!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!of so-called topsoil over gravel!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The next bit of unsettlement was the vacation we were planning starting the end of the month got moved up to six days from today. I am so unready. I guess I will need it by the time I am there. I have certainly needed tea!

So, on to some tea. One of the teas I have had recently was from the Tea Trekker - it is Wuyi Da Hong Pao Black. from Fujian Province, China. The black and brown leaves smelled something like an old candy with a bit of sharpness added. Maybe close to pineapple. I used a large teaspoon brewed at 212 for 3.5 minutes. As it brewed the aroma shifted to something earthy, sharp and metallic, like a hot iron woodstove. The flavor was nutty and yes, earthy, with a bit of astringency and some cocoa sprinkled over it. I couldn't decide if I liked it or not, but didn't have anymore to taste. I added a bit of cream at the end and you shouldn't, it did nothing for it.

Hopefully I will be able to write some more before vacation - if nothing else happens. I have comforted myself with baking bread and biscuits. Ta for now