It’s Tea Time at Charleston Tea Plantation

A sign shows the distance to other parts of the world where tea plants are grown.

What sounds perfect on a rainy chilly day?  Hot tea!  We’d set out from Kiawah Island in late February (2015) to visit some notable outdoor sites in Charleston, South Carolina, but the morning rain persisted so we saw little more than gift shops (where we could stay dry).  As we returned to Kiawah, we turned off at the Charleston Tea Plantation, which is about twenty miles south of Charleston on Wadmalaw Island. We could stay dry in a trolley as we rode around the plantation.  And there was plenty of free hot tea in the gift shop!

Guests tour the Charleston Tea Plantation on one of two trolleys. This one was purchased from the Kentucky Derby city of Louisville, Kentucky, and still retains its name of “Man of War,” a famous race horse.

It was overcast and a little misty when we arrived, but no umbrellas were required.   My hair was already frizzed out by now anyway.  According to the plantation’s website, “Wadmalaw Island is in the heart of South Carolina’s Lowcountry…Wadmalaw provides the perfect environment for propagating tea. With its sandy soils, sub-tropical climate and average rainfall of 52 inches per year, Wadmalaw possess idyllic conditions for the Camellia Sinensis plant. This plant is currently used to produce both black and green teas and exists in over 320 varieties on the 127 acre grounds of the Charleston Tea Plantation.”

Here are two kinds of American Classic Tea — Charleston Breakfast Tea and Governor Gray, flavored with bergamot, one of my favorites.

Owned by the Bigelow Tea Company, the plantation grows the tea sold under the brand name American Classic Tea. The Charleston Tea Plantation is the only working tea plantation in North America and is open to the public for tours of the grounds and factory and for hosting private events. Every year the plantation also hosts the First Flush Festival celebrating the beginning of the harvest season.  The name, First Flush, means the new leaves that are beginning to grow on the tea plant bushes that are ready to be harvested for production.

The tea Plant, Camellia sinensis, needs a lot of moisture, but doesn’t like wet roots, so good sources of water, as well as good drainage are required to keep the plants healthy.

Since 1987, the American Classic Tea brand of the Charleston Tea Plantation has been the official tea of the White House.

Plenty of rain is what Camellia sinensis likes, so at least the tea plants were happy!  There were several types of hot tea waiting for us to try, which we happily drank while waiting for our $10 trolley ride. Our trolley was called “Man of War,” named after the famous horse. Our driver told us that the plantation bought the trolley on ebay from the city of Louisville, the Kentucky Derby town.  We stopped along the way at the state-of-the-art greenhouse, where tea plant propagation takes place. The tour is narrated in a recording by William Barclay Hall, founder of American Classic Tea and world renowned Tea Taster, as well as by the very knowledgeable driver.  The plantation was only started in 1960, although other southern plantations had tried to grow tea plants previously.

The leaves are processed at the plantation factory, but the final product is packaged in Connecticut. We were there during the off-season, so we didn’t see any harvesting or processing.

Experimental tea plants at Charleston Tea Plantation in South Carolina.

From Wikipedia:  “In 1799, French botanist, Francois Andre Michaux brought the Camellia Sinensis  plant to the United States and gave it to Henry Middleton. They planted the tea at Middleton’s plantation. The tea seemed to thrive in areas like Charleston and Georgetown.  It took many attempts by multiple companies and individuals to successfully establish a tea company without an early failure. These failures included plantations in Georgetown, Greenville and Summerville, the longest of which lasted less than twenty years. The Thomas J Lipton Company decided to give it a try.  In 1960, they bought the failing tea plantation in Summerville and in 1963 they moved out to Wadmalaw Island  and operated a research station for about twenty-five years. 

You can’t visit the Charleston Tea Plantation without taking home some tea! The plantation website also links to shops where the tea is sold.

The Charleston Tea Plantation, as it is known today, was established in 1987 when Mack Fleming and William (Bill) Barclay Hall bought the land and the research station from the Lipton Company. Mack Fleming, a horticultural professor, had been running the plantation for the Lipton Company and Bill Hall was a third generation tea tester from England.  Along with establishing the plantation, they created the American Classic Tea brand. ”  The R.C. Bigelow Company in Connecticut bought the plantation about a decade ago.

Charles Tea Plantation Website.

Wikipedia: Charleston Tea Plantation

Bigelow Tea Company.

Health and Beauty Tips Using Tea!

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Spanish moss drapes a dormant pecan tree awaiting Spring at the Charleston Tea Plantation in South Carolina.

Automatic sprinklers keep tea plant cuttings moist in a state-of-the-art greenhouse at the Charleston Tea Plantation.

Tea plants are members of the Camellia family and produce lovely white flowers.

Sprinklers in the tea plant greenhouse are set to keep the tea cuttings at optimum moisture.

Across the rows of tea plants, you can see the green harvester machine and the gift shop and factory of the Charles Tea Plantation.

This one-of-a-kind tea leaf harvester will clip the new growth of tea plants several times a year at Charleston Tea Plantation.

Explanations of how tea cuttings are propagated.

These charts show how the tea plant cuttings are propagated.

Propagation Hut at Charleston Tea Plantation

You can drink all of the tea you want — hot or cold — in the gift shop of the Charleston Tea Plantation. All of the varieties of tea available are from tea grown on the plantation.

Tea leaves are withered on this bed.

The amount of oxidation time determines the type of tea.

Of Elephants and Alcohol

Is this elephant dreaming of the delicious marula fruit as she eats grass at a game reserve in South Africa?

I love fruit, but I’d never heard of marula fruit until a friend (Thanks, Anita!) introduced me to Amarula, a creamy liqueur made in Africa from fermented marula fruit.

Fermented marula fruit makes a delicious drink when mixed with cream for humans in a liqueur called Amarula. Elephants will eat the fermented fruit, but it’s a myth that they’ll get drunk. They couldn’t eat enough to get inebriated. The Amarula Trust promotes Africa elephant protection and social development in Africa. This elephant sculpture is on display at the O.R. Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Elephants like to eat marula fruit and are Amarula’s symbol. Folklore through the ages told of elephants getting drunk on fermented marula fruit, but that tall tale has been debunked.  I don’t want to be a party pooper, but elephants couldn’t eat enough fermented fruit to get bombed.  According to a 2006 scientific study cited in Smithsonian Magazine, “Elephants do have a taste for alcohol, but when scientists sat down to look at the claim, they found several problems. First, the elephants don’t eat the rotten fruit off the ground. They eat the fresh fruit right off the tree. Second, the fresh fruit doesn’t spend enough time in the elephant to ferment and produce alcohol there. And, third, even if the elephant did eat the rotten fruit, the animal would have to eat 1,400 pieces of exceptionally fermented fruit to get drunk.”
Smithsonian Magazine: The Alcoholics of the Animal World.

Elephants like to eat marula fruit, but much of what elephants eat is not fully digested. Here, some marula nuts have passed through an elephant. The surviving marula fruits might be eaten by other animals or germinate into new trees.

While the elephants don’t get soused from fermented fruits, elephants are among the many species that enjoy the versatile marula fruit for its flesh and its nut, which is full of protein. The marula fruit and its nut have been important source of nutrition in Africa for eons. The fruit has eight times the Vitamin C of an orange, too. Among the animals that eat the marula fruit and nut are antelopes, including impalas, kudus and nyalas. Baboons, warthogs, zebras, porcupines, vervet monkeys, small mammals and even millipedes also feed on the marula, which belongs to the same plant family Anacardiaceae as the mango, cashew, pistachio and sumac. Browsing animals eat the leaves. Marula nut oil is also supposed to have rejuvenating effect on your skin, so the marula can give you a glow both inside and out. About the Marula Tree and Fruit. About Marula Oil for Your Skin.

While reading this post I recommend an Amarula cocktail, which has a mild creamy citrus flavor. If you can’t find Amarula, you can sip Bailey’s Irish Cream or Kahlua. Drink responsibly, of course!

Amarula.

Here’s My Recipe for a Wild Elephant, which is really a White Russia, replacing the Kahlua with Amarula:
2 oz vodka
1 oz Amarula liqueur
light cream

Pour vodka and Amarula liqueur over ice cubes in an old-fashioned glass. Fill with light cream and serve.
Serves one.
For other recipes. click on Cocktail Recipes. 

In a game reserve in South Africa, baboons congregate in and under a marula tree to eat the marula fruit. Impala antelope stand under the tree to eat the dropped fruit. Click on the photo to get a better view.

The long-time belief that elephants and other animals get drunk on fermented marula fruit was popularized in the 1974 documentary “Animals are Beautiful People.” Some smaller animals can get drunk from fermented fruit, but people have claimed that the supposedly drunkenness of the animals from fermented marula was staged in the movie, after alcohol had been added to their food.  If so, that’s animal abuse. The narration is over the top, too, but the video does show the types of animals that eat the marula fruit. It also shows elephants shaking marula trees to knock down the fruit.
Scientific American: Do Animals Like to Get Drunk?
Drunken Elephants: The Marula Fruit Myth
About “Animals are Beautiful People.”

The marula fruit on this tree will turn yellow when ripe.

Owls don’t eat marula fruits, of course, but the branches make a handy perch. Perhaps some unsuspecting creature looking for fruit may become the owl’s dinner.

Marula fruit is washed along with sand over a walkway after a rainy night at the game reserve lodge where we stayed in January 2013.

I’m going to be party pooper again by listing this new Study from the Boston University School of Public Health that shows links of alcohol to cancer. Darn it!

Smooth!

Frozen blueberries and banana slices blended with milk make a great smoothie.

I’m hooked on smoothies.  This passion started when it finally dawned on me that I should slice and freeze bananas that were over ripe or soon would be.  Later (really I only waited about a day) I blended the frozen banana slices with chocolate milk.  Velvety, sweet and icy cold.  I highly recommend it.  The calories are worth it, but I usually skip lunch on a smoothie day, anyway.

Recently, I harvested  a pint or more of strawberries from my garden every day for two weeks.  I froze some.   Hmmm.  Bananas? Strawberries?  I threw them together in the blender with some milk (and sometimes vanilla yogurt), pulsed them for a while, added a little sweetener, and the result was so delicious I was sorry I hadn’t thought of this earlier in my life. It’s not as if smoothies are a new idea.  Sometimes it takes me a while to catch on.

I drank these strawberry-banana concoctions so quickly that I never photographed a single one of them before the strawberry season was over.  When my husband bought some blueberries, I was ready with my blender and my camera.  And what do you know!  Frozen blueberries and bananas make a great smoothie, too!  I held myself back from drinking this blueberry-banana smoothie  (photo above) long enough to snap a photo.  Next — Peaches!

Coffee, the Miracle Drink

Coffee is good for you! At least that jolt you feel won’t harm you too much, if you don’t overdo it. So don’t feel guilty sharing a cup with your friends.

Maybe I’m exaggerating a bit by saying coffee is a miracle drink, but it sure feels that way in the morning when I brew my first batch.  I have a cheap cappuccino maker, which barely sputters the milk into foam. But who cares about foam?  The important thing is that the coffee elixir is saturated with caffeine.  All of my muscles come alive as I sip.  I feel the energy flowing through my veins.

One of the best things about making coffee is the empty can. I order my coffee in bags now, but I’ve saved plenty of cans to use to store my brushes.

We’ve had a lot of scares about coffee and caffeine throughout the years.  Doctors have warned me to stop drinking coffee because the caffeine worsened fibrocystic disease, for example.   Sometimes I’ve sworn it off, because I get caffeine withdrawal headaches.  But I always come right back to my old lover, warts and all.

I didn’t drink coffee until I was out of college (back in the 1970s, if you must know.)  I also rarely drank tea or colas.  Diet colas in those days were awful.  I rarely even ate chocolate, if you can believe that. So I wasn’t getting much, if any, caffeine.  I didn’t know what I was missing.

Some friends recognized the value of caffeine much earlier than I did.  Jan stayed up late into the night, fueled on Coke and sugar cookie dough, to finish art and sewing projects.  Some people took their caffeine in pill form.  No-Doze was popular right before finals.

Finally, coffee just clicked with me.  People had tried to get me interested before.  “Hey, little girl, want some coffee?”  But I always resisted.  We all have our breaking point. On a nonstop drive from Lawrence, Kansas, to visit Jan in Berkeley, California, my friend Kathy and I (click here to jump to a previous adventure with Kathy) made a pit stop in Salt Lake City. That city is NOT a mecca of caffeine consumption, but I needed some artificial energy to keep driving. I grabbed a cup of coffee at a diner.  Even I, the coffee virgin, knew it was swill, but I was hooked.   Perhaps, it was inevitable.  Most Americans drink coffee. My father used to joke that his father liked his coffee so thick you could float a spoon in it, and my father had a pot brewing all day long.  My son Matt mastered the fine art of brewing espresso.  Still, there are coffee abstainers even in my own family.

Jane E. Brody of the The New York Times discusses the health issues of coffee and caffeine in a recent article in a link here:  Sorting Out Coffee’s Contradictions

If you want to read all about coffee, go to www.answers.com and ask the right questions.  And don’t leave this post until you check out my photograph below of a chicken under a coffee tree.

This chicken scratches for dinner under coffee and banana trees near Le Tigre National Park in Honduras. The red cherry covering the coffee bean is edible. I tried one. It was slightly sweet. Tropical highlands are ideal for growing coffee. Perhaps, the land would find a better use if we all weren’t so addicted to coffee.