Tea, Thé

Around last Christmas a colleague had brought tea to the office and she was making this wonderful chocolate organic tea, the aroma in the office was just wonderful and very strong. I asked her about it and she told me her children had bought it at a tea shop on Bank Street in Ottawa. I went to David's Tea some time later and bought in tin cans their loose leaf tea. All the teas they have you select from a small catalogue. You ask for the tea you want and they measure it by grams and with a spoon transfer it from a larger container to your tin, you can smell and sample before you buy, price is by weight. If you bring back the tin canister then you get a discount. It's a nice modern shop with soothing colours devoted to tea. By the way the tea my colleague had received as a gift has no chocolate in it per see, it is composed of a mixture of green rooibos and green tea with some cinnamon.

I bought Earl Gray made from Chinese black tea, oil of Bergamot and Cornflower petals. It smells wonderful. The other one I bought was Earl Gray's Garden, made from Black Ceylon tea, bergamot, blue cornflowers, freeze-dried strawberry pieces. Again wonderful and rich. See www.davidstea.com

They offer many other types of teas, like Oolong and flavoured Oolong, Pu'erh, rooibos, maté, herbal, white and green teas. Seeing all these teas reminded me of excursions we would make in Beijing to the south west of the City to the neighbourhood of Ma Lian Dao where all the tea warehouses are.

Also this weekend I finally found after months of searching a Jade tree, which is like a small bonzai. Not to be confused with a Jade Plant.  I wanted a Jade tree that was about 12 inches high. It has a beautiful form and fits into the Ching Dynasty vase, the Jade tree needs full light and is potted in soil fit for cactus and succulent plants, the soil should be allowed to become quite dry before watering again. The vase I purchased in Beijing six years ago. The Ching Dynasty came to power in the 17th Century in China pushing out the Ming Dynasty which was the last Han Chinese rulers in China. The Ching rulers were not Han Chinese, did not speak Mandarin and had very different culture and traditions. They are a people from Manchuria an area between today's North Korea and Mongolia. This explains the very complex design on the vase with peonies, birds and butterflies, so different from the more simple Ming white and blue design.