Infused

by Henrietta Lovell

  He did peer into my mouth and ask why I didn’t have perfect veneers. I explained I didn’t need them because I wasn’t a celebrity. I can’t tell you how much he loved that. Almost everybody in LA wants to be a star. There is nothing more exotic or exciting in Hollywood than someone who doesn’t have anything to do with the film industry. The only profession more exciting than teeth is possibly my real one.

  In Tinseltown they are prepared to take the Tea (or Teeth) Lady to their hearts, and I am grateful. It’s not known as the most genuine of towns, but it’s too easy to stereotype, and I have made some wonderful friends. If anything unites the people of Los Angeles, it’s that they are an abstemious lot. It’s not like New York, where you might go for dinner at 10 p.m. The hottest table in LA is at six. Early nights and lots of beauty sleep for the angels. But not at the Chateau. Everyone needs a place to let their hair down. Which brings me back, at last, to why they needed a hangover tea on the breakfast menu.

  It’s a wild-harvested rooibos, sweetened with a bit of maple syrup, brought alive by a squeeze of lemon juice or a spritz of lemon zest and balanced, like a salty caramel, with a single grain of sea salt. It’s smooth, deep and mellow and, goddamn it, I think it really works. Rooibos has been used for thousands of years by tribesmen in Africa to treat dehydration. The maple and the salt provide the necessary electrolytes to make it isotonic.

  HANGOVER RESCUE RECIPE

  Use 3g of rooibos tea per 150ml of boiling water and steep for three to five minutes. Strain and stir in half to one teaspoon of maple syrup, according to preference; a squeeze of half a lemon; and a flake of sea salt. Add a twist of lemon zest on top.

  When I’m particularly crushed by a hangover, crushed so small I feel like a little girl lost in an IKEA car park in a strange city as night falls, I use vanilla rooibos.

  You don’t have to buy a flavoured rooibos. Some synthetic vanilla flavourings come from by-products of the wood-pulping industry, and the natural ones might come from the anal glands of beavers. (Okay, the beaver bum juice is a rare one you’re unlikely to stumble across, but it is a ‘natural’ flavouring.) It’s safer to just use vanilla pods.

  Fill a glass jar (I use one with a wired, flip-top, rubber-sealed lid) full of rooibos. Take a vanilla pod and cut it open lengthways, as if opening the belly of a fish. Stick it in the jar so that it’s entirely submersed in the rooibos (cut the pod into pieces if you need to). Put the jar in a cupboard you use regularly and leave it for a couple of weeks, giving it a shake every time you see it.

  You can use a zip-lock bag instead, but I’ve found glass is better at holding the flavour over time. The good stuff has so much flavour, you want to keep it at its best. And the really good stuff is wild.

  CHAPTER 9

  CEDERBERG MOUNTAINS, SOUTH AFRICA

  In the Cederberg Mountains of South Africa, about three hours’ drive due north of Cape Town, you find rooibos, an endemic herb. Travelling through an increasingly desiccated landscape into semi-arid desert not dissimilar to northern California, you wonder how anything can grow there. The colours fade softly into lilac mountains, umber fields of dry earth and blue-grey grasses. The sun-bleached land bakes under a bright cerulean sky.

  Harvest time for rooibos is January, the height of the South African summer. In 2016 I visited the farm I’d been working with for many years and arrived to find them seriously worried there wouldn’t be a harvest at all. It hadn’t rained since April. Not a drop. Those wild desert plants are hardy as a cowboy on the range, but not even they can survive a prolonged drought. Things were looking very dire when I reached the tiny town of Clanwilliam and walked into the doctor’s office.

  Frikkie Strauss is my farmer, the man who harvests the best rooibos I’ve ever tasted, from wild bushes. He is also the local GP, head of the board of the local hospital and father to three children. He has a good many worries and responsibilities outside of the farm where he grew up, just a few kilometres from town and into the mountains. Through the years I’ve known him, Dr Strauss has continued to amaze me with his dynamo energy. His bright eyes are fierce and inquiring. He looks at you with an intensity that seems to spear you, and then, in an instant, he’s off on another hunt and you are released.

  The happiest I ever see him is on horseback or in his truck, riding through the farm looking for herds of eland or Cape leopard tracks. This time he was subdued. We rode across the farm looking at the dust-muted bushes that should have been bright with yellow flowers. He told me he was afraid to harvest a single stem lest he kill those precious plants, plants that had survived there for who knew how many years, in the wild, in that hard terrain.

  He showed me his neighbour’s cultivated rooibos, young bushes planted in neat rows. All dead. The cultivated rooibos is grown in lines for ease of harvesting and all the other desert plants are removed: a monocrop. But rooibos is a fynbos (Dutch for ‘fine bush’), one of a host of native plants specific to this special area of the Western Cape. It needs its fynbos family to survive.

  South African fynbos makes up the tiniest and most extraordinary floral kingdom in the world. A floral kingdom is a geographical area globally recognised for its distinctive plant life; there are six in the world, one of which is this Cape Floral Kingdom that spreads across a narrow crescent from the mountains to the ocean. It has more than nine thousand species of plants, of which 70 per cent are endemic, growing nowhere else in the world. One of those is rooibos. Three per cent of all the world’s plants are found here, on less than 0.05 per cent of the Earth’s land surface. It has three times more plant species per square kilometre than most rainforests. In 2004, the Cederberg was confirmed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

  Conservation of fynbos is critical to the survival of this botanical treasure. The Cape Floral Kingdom is the original home of some of the world’s favourite plants: gladioli, freesias, geraniums and agapanthus. In springtime, if the rains come, Frikkie’s dusty land is alive with flowers. And then there are the Cape leopards, an elusive, endangered species that still has a foothold in these mountains.

  Harvesting wild rooibos was Frikkie’s idea. If land is going to be protected, it needs to be valuable, like the game reserves made sustainable by tourists. Because of the very delicate ecosystem, he didn’t want to monocrop rooibos. He doesn’t farm at all where the rooibos grows, the eland wander and the leopards stalk. He leaves it untamed, and once a year we go in on horseback to harvest the wild plants, cutting just what we need and leaving the plants alive.

  The farmed rooibos across this small region, the only place in the world where it grows, is not so lucky. It doesn’t have the protection from or symbiotic relationship with the other fynbos plants. It needs to be irrigated because its roots are shallow. The plants don’t live long enough to establish a safe place in such arid land. This results in soil-erosion issues and its cultivation does nothing to protect the area’s delicate flora and fauna. Not only that, farmed rooibos doesn’t taste as good. It’s a bit weedy, lacking the deep, woody, cedar flavours and the bright, berrylike top notes.

  Frikkie’s wild rooibos is sustainable farming at its very best. There was no way he could cut the bushes in a terrible drought. The rains are supposed to come in the winter. January is midsummer in the Cederberg and temperatures were soaring above 40°C every day. As I joined the family one Sunday afternoon for lunch out on the farm, it reached an airless 47°C. We couldn’t even braai. A South African saying it’s too hot to barbecue meat over an open fire is like a duck saying the pond is too wet to swim. Having a braai is their national pastime. But at 47°C we could barely move in the dry mountain air. Sweat flowed and dried almost immediately, leaving salty crystal trails on our skin.

  You can see why the people of this area have always needed to worry about hydration. It isn’t the jasmine gin that does them in but the extreme, dry heat. And for that they have rooibos. It’s been used for thousands of years in the Cederberg Mountains as a medicine, especially for children with upset stomachs. Not
only does it have many of the antioxidants (flavonoids) found in tea, it is also rich in minerals (calcium, iron, manganese, magnesium, sodium, potassium and zinc). With a flake of salt and a drop of something sweet like honey – or maple syrup, for better flavour and to really bring out the natural caramel notes and turn the woody flavours to toffee – the mineral electrolytes in rooibos will help the body reabsorb water rapidly.

  If you find yourself waking up to a shattering hangover, I would highly recommend a pot. At the very least it tastes wonderful. It will treat you far more gently than coffee and there is no caffeine in rooibos, so you can go back to bed, hydrated, and sleep it off.

  But we’ve left Frikkie and his family wilting over an empty table. We drove back to town and lay down in the dark of our rooms to wait for the worst of the heat to pass. And that was when we heard it: the slow rumble of thunder. We could see thick grey clouds on the other side of the mountains. A rainstorm was raging and flashing white lightning through the hot air. You could feel it. We tried not to get too hopeful, knowing the storm could bypass us completely; it could blow in any direction and was unlikely to reach us.

  I heard Dr Strauss calling me and I could hear the excitement in his voice. I leapt off the bed and grabbed a pair of shoes as I ran to the front door. His mother, who was up at the farm, had called to say she’d seen rain. We jumped into the truck and raced up the sandy roads winding into the mountains. Slow, fat drops smashed against the windscreen, but not enough to merit using the windscreen wipers. This wasn’t rain, it was a splatter that vanished instantly on the hot glass and dry earth without leaving a mark. The thunder was closer. It boomed loudly about us and was quickly followed by strobes of light. We drove higher, and the air started to smell of rain and rooibos. It was suddenly cool, dropping decimals of degrees every few hundred metres. I could feel the hairs on my arms rising as the lightning flicked its tongue, too close. And then the clouds covered us, and the rain sang down.

  He stopped the truck and we jumped out into the wet. In an instant we were gloriously soaked. The rain was falling so hard, it pockmarked the red earth and drummed hard on the truck. The smell was intense. The earth and the fynbos plants had seemed inert, barren, almost dead in the dry heat. Now in the cool wet they perfumed the air with vibrant life. I could single out the rooibos, knowing that scent so particularly. It was like the violins soaring in a full orchestra of smell.

  Frikkie dug a pale stick into the earth and beamed as he pulled it out, blackened along its length by the water. The rain was being absorbed deep down. Deep enough to save the plants and, more than that, enough to allow a harvest. We stood there in silent wonder. Not jumping up and down or whooping, just stunned at the incredible luck and the joy of the moment. We watched the tops of the mountains melt into rainclouds. We watched the dry ochre earth turn terracotta red. We watched the dust being washed from the needle-like leaves of the rooibos bushes, revealing their vivid green.

  In the car driving up, Frikkie had said that this would be a stroke of unbelievable good fortune. It doesn’t matter how brilliant a farmer you are, if the rain doesn’t come, your crops will fail. It’s out of your control. A farmer knows he has to be lucky, and especially so as the climate changes and droughts get longer and more severe. We were witnessing rain in the middle of the dry season, in the middle of a drought. And it wasn’t passing by with a quick sprinkle but staying and pouring and reaching down into the earth and the roots. Lightning hissed overhead as the thunder ricocheted around the mountains.

  I was struck by lightning in another mountain range, the Bolivian Andes, in my life before tea. I survived, obviously, but it has left me with a sickening thrill whenever it lights the sky. That afternoon it reminded me how lucky I’d been: to have survived its strike, cancer twice, a fall down a glacier, a riptide. To have started a company that has survived fourteen years at the time of writing has a lot to do with chance. I have walked a knife edge and I know it’s not always my hard work or optimism that’s saved me but random acts of chance that could easily have gone the other way.

  There in the rain in the Cederberg, in amongst the fynbos with Frikkie, I felt fantastically lucky. I hold these moments dear: rain in the desert, coming to after the lightning strike, waking up in Claridge’s, negative biopsy reports, staring down into an icy crevasse rather than up from within it, gasping breathless but safe on the beach, and every time I discover a truly delicious new tea.

  As we stood there quietly witnessing this extraordinary event, something even more extraordinary happened: frogs began to sing. In the dry, dusty mountains, where had they come from? The wet earth brought them to life, but heaven knows how it happened so fast on such arid land. If Frikkie hadn’t been there, I’d have suspected I was hallucinating. It didn’t seem possible. It still doesn’t. But they were there – their throaty song as real as the rain.

  MAKING ROOIBOS

  I like rooibos very strong, so I give it a long steep. I use 3g per 150ml (a dessertspoon per cup). I recommend using boiling water and a steep of between two and five minutes.

  Delicious on its own, or with maple syrup and lemon, it’s also good with a thin slice of ginger. It works well with milk too. In South Africa they often drink it much the same way as British people drink black tea – with milk and sugar. The colour is amazing.

  It’s also wonderful left to cool and served over ice. Going back to the lost child in the car park, you could also add a spoon of vanilla ice cream.

  CHAPTER 10

  KYOTO, JAPAN

  I wasn’t always so good at appreciating my good fortune. But I did get some reluctant guidance at the beginning of my adventures that helped me enormously. Frazzled by the effort of starting a business, I found myself in Ryoan-ji, a Zen Buddhist temple in Kyoto, taking tea with a monk. I asked him for advice. He didn’t want to give me any.

  It was a pale November day, with a thick layer of snow lying on the temple roofs. I padded through the cold, silent, paper-walled rooms in stocking feet. The monk sat down cross-legged, overlooking the garden, wrapped in soft wool robes. I knelt in front of him, my feet beneath me frozen. He took out a small metal canister of matcha encased in highly polished dark red cherry-tree bark. As he measured out the fine-powdered green tea with a long-handled bamboo scoop (chashaku), he looked up at me gravely, simultaneously measuring my attention. With a whisk, finely carved from a single stem of bamboo, he mixed the matcha with hot water until the powder was perfectly suspended, his wrist moving as deftly as the most practised onanist. He passed me the carefully asymmetrical hand-made tea bowl, its surface covered in a fine foam, and a small, sweet, red-bean cake.

  My fingers warmed around the bowl. I lifted it to my lips slowly, with both hands. The monk held my gaze. The tea was smooth and strong and gloriously complex. It had an extraordinary balance, being bright, bitter and strong yet smooth, grassy and mellow. I smiled automatically at the intense pleasure. He nodded at the bean cake. I put down the bowl and took a small nibble, feeling like Alice. The bland, sticky sweetness coated my mouth. I picked up my bowl again and took another sip of matcha. The sweetness melted away with the silky tea and the bright intensity heightened.

  That trip had been a headlong dash, like much of my life, at full speed. Spending time in Japan always puts me on unsteady ground. I feel acutely other, more foreign than anywhere else I have ever travelled to. Take crossing the road: at lunchtime in Tokyo workers emerge from their offices in droves. To cross the road, they don’t face down the traffic like Londoners or New Yorkers, hoping to stop tonnes of speeding metal with a stern look of intent. They don’t shimmy between the ceaseless flow of cars the way you have to in Mexico City. It’s not like Delhi where the cars and people and cows negotiate round each other in a terrifying, good-natured jumble. In Tokyo the crowd waits. They cross in murmurations, to the electronic sound of tweeting birds. I once tried to cross an empty street in the small coastal town of Miyagi when it wasn’t the appropriate time or place and was sternly told n
ot to. A few days after I left, the devastating tsunami hit. The gentleman who had corrected me for inappropriate road crossing explained the incredible forbearance of the people. Even as the huge wall of water came rampaging up behind them, people fleeing for their lives stopped their cars at red traffic lights.

  Arriving at the temple was like rushing into space. Suddenly I felt weightless. There was a water garden with no water. Ryoan-ji, the Temple of the Dragon at Peace, is considered one of the finest surviving examples of kare sansui, ‘dry landscape’. It is listed as one of the historic monuments of ancient Kyoto and as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Large mossy stones, capped in snow, were carefully arranged in a stream of perfectly raked gravel. Thousands of years of expertise had made this garden. Each stone sat in its perfect place among the others and each swirl in the gravel eddied harmoniously between the stones. It might sound uncomfortably formal but, waiting on the wooden veranda in the thin winter sunshine, it felt generous and graciously calm.

  While we drank matcha the monk looked over this garden and I asked him what advice he had for people like me, city people, who were always rushing. He didn’t reply. He looked at me calmly and waited for the next question. When I pressed him, he became annoyed and said it was a strange thing to ask him because he wasn’t one of those people.

  I kept on. He explained that he was a Zen Buddhist monk living in a monastery overlooking a water garden. He didn’t rush, so he couldn’t advise me on rushing. Well, of course that makes sense, but at the time I was baffled. I had expected him to impart some wise words. I am ashamed to tell you that I thought I knew his answer. The garden had made my noisy head quiet for a moment. I thought he would suggest I slow down and take a moment to appreciate that moment. I wasn’t asking advice so much as asking him to tell me what I thought I knew.