A collection of blossoms in Greek is an anthologia which would later give in English florilegium (from the Latin translation) and anthology. Even if what I will write below doesn’t come from existing works, I found the name beautiful enough for small pieces of reflections on tea. So here are some blossoms.

Teas are like people. Some are open, others are secret. Some are generous, others are selfish. Some are easy, others are more complex…

See? Every reaction/thought you might have about people, you can find at least one tea matching it. And like with people, the more you interact with a tea, the more you get out of it (or the more you despair it all depends on you and them).

What is the effect on tea on me? I used to think none. However, someone made me recently reconsider my first answer but after much attention with myself focusing on myself (quite egocentric if you believe me), I didn’t find any peculiar effect. To have a real scientific approach, I should have taken the same tea brewed in the same way (which I didn’t). However, I must say that tea doesn’t seem to have an effect on me. The only explanation is that the people around me or what I am doing at the time of drinking have an effect on how am I and how I react.

What Egyptian god should be associated to tea? A rather strange question but after seeing a picture of the March Hare I found myself asking this. 3 gods truck my imagination for being able to do so. Thot, the scribe of the gods, just because he could and because a god with the head of an ibis would look cool drinking a cup writing hieroglyphs. Then Seshat the divine measurer because tea is all about measuring things (amount of tea, temperature of the water, duration of the brewing). Last but not least, Bes, the protector of households and symbol of the good things of life (and isn’t tea one of them?).

Now that I began with these gods, I should probably see if other divinities strike me as potential tea drinkers but apart from the Nordic ones (probably because of the cold winter times that struck me as the perfect time to drink a good warm tea).

Quite interesting is that the name for tea in most languages can be grouped in 3 families : te, cha and chay. And that they just show where tea was loaded or travelled to the land where they were drunk. This means that only 3 points of contact were available : two port areas in China and through a land trip and Persia (aka the road silk). From an historical point of view, this makes sense as when European powers came in the neighbourhoods from China, this land was following a rather strict isolation policy restricting their contacts with foreigners. As you might know, Chinese at that time were not trading, they were receiving tributes for the Emperor which gave away gifts. It would have probably been undiplomatic to say that this looks just like barter, in other words, trade.

Related to these trade routes, I don’t know if you know a French comic book hero called Asterix but he is the one who brought tea leaves to England and all that thanks to a Phoenician merchant encountered in the Channel that paid him with these leaves in exchange for saving his ship from pirates. Asterix then gave these leaves to the Britons as a sort of super potion to help them defeat the Roman legions.

Speaking of super potion, tea has probably like many other things good effects on health but I don’t think it is a super medicine that can solve anything and everything with people reacting differently to this drink (see my blossom on “what is the effect on tea on me?”)