An old-fashioned bouquet of camellias
your grandmother’s tea service
have more in common than the sideboard
on which they’re standing.
The camellia bush with its shiny
green leaves and corsage blossoms is
Camellia japonica; the evergreen
tea plant, Camellia sinensis.
If left to grow in the wild,
sinensis can reach thirty feet high.
(In Yunnan province, China,
an ancient tea tree
towers
a hundred feet over the landscape.)
Cultivated tea plants are pruned
to waist height to
encourage the
dense growth
of young
shoots,
called
flush.
The flush for finer teas
are still
handpicked.
An experienced picker, almost
always a woman,
can pluck
in one day flush enough
for nine pounds of finished tea:
1800 cups, six month’s imbibing
for a thirsty Brit
and his camellia-gathering
grandmother.
a found poem from The New Tea Book by Sara Perry, which means the words are (mostly) Perry’s; the line breaks, mine own.
This post is offered as part of Tweetspeak Poetry’s found poem project, Tea for Two.