Finding an old friend at the Tea Expo

Behold the tea plant! I beheld this one at the booth of William Hall of the Charleston Tea Plantation. (In a bit of bad timing, I last visited Charleston just weeks before the plantation opened for public tours, but I do hope to visit one day.)

Today was the final day of the World Tea Expo, and I spent the morning at sessions hosted by Dr. Ronald Sebold, who spoke on tea and health. Thank goodness this nice man had such exhaustive handouts, for I have tons of research studies I want to look up and check out for myself, but I will say this: I am going to up my daily consumption of green tea PRONTO. Sebold obviously has great passion for his topic, and I was more than a little amused when, after he told about studies on rats, he gave an example that began something like this: "Five rats go into a tearoom ..."

During a break I happened to run into a dear lady I met probably a dozen or so years ago, Mildred Huff Coleman, whose "Frances Virginia Tea Room Cookbook" is one of my favorites. I interviewed her when she came to Scott's Bookstore for a signing and was charmed by her Victorian attire and ladylike manner. I was delighted when she asked if we could sit together during the second session on tea and health, and I greatly enjoyed catching up with her. I'm sure I'll have more to say about her in print later, and hopefully we'll be adding my newspaper tea columns to this blog in the near future.