Tea

"Tell me about tea," he says.

She smiles a coy, close lipped smile then says, "tea is at least a couple thousand years older than coffee. No one knows exactly when or where the drink was invented but most agree it was somewhere in Asia, probably China. Legend has it that an emperor was drinking from a bowl of boiling water. He set it aside and the wind blew tea leaves into it. When the emperor took his next drink, he enjoyed the taste as well as the refreshed, energized feeling it gave him."

"Do you think that's how it happened?"

More serious now, she looks up from the cup of tea in front of her, looks him directly in the eyes as if testing him somehow. "Do you want to know what I think?"

Caught off guard by this sudden turn in demeanor, he draws back a bit, eyebrows raised but he shrugs and asks her to go on.

"Most histories relating to tea have to do with people discovering or creating the drink. The legend about the emperor is a very popular one but I think that story has it backwards. I think that tea trees always knew about the latent potential of their leaves. I think they stood for millennia just waiting for the opportunity to share their secret treasure. But trees are nothing, if not patient."

"It wasn't always this way with them, the trees and their eagerness to share themselves. Do you know about the Arbor Council?"

Eyebrows still raised, he shakes his head.

"It spans the globe. Messages are carried on the wind. Minutes are recorded in tree rings and the archives are infused into the soil. Territorial rights are settled in this way. Notes on climate changes are shared. Reports on how they are being treated by man also play a big role."

"There was a long stretch of time where trees were on the defensive. Man learned harvesting, the agricultural age had begun and as civilizations grew, their exploitation of trees reached unprecedented levels. The news on the wind was abuzz with talk of hardening themselves against their axes, of toppling themselves on the tree cutters. At the worst of it the idea was floated to turn their sap, seeds, and fruit to poison - a slow acting poison that would take the humans gradually. It would be too late for them far before they found the source of their demise."

"It was this idea that turned the tide. One family of trees in Eastern Asia, Theaceae, was repulsed by this turn in the discussion. One subset in particular, genus Camellia, took the lead in proposing an entirely new paradigm."