Elderflower Tea

When a cup of delicious tea is as simple as walking out to the hedgerow, picking some flowers, popping them in a bowl and then covering with hot water, it would be madness not to do it.  Yet making Elderflower tea didn’t occur to me until the boys brought in a bowl full after their pirate scavenger hunt this morning.

I’m familiar with many of the properties of the wonderful Elder tree, the berries are fantastic made into a cough syrup or wine, the flowers make a fragrant cordial and perfume the early summer air with a sweetness beyond description.  But making the Elderflowers into a tea was something I’d never considered until Huwyl asked me if we could.  A quick check on the interwebs revealed that indeed the flowers would make a tasty tea with antioxidant properties helpful in supporting the immune system, helping to combat allergies and an all round stress reliever too!

We steeped our tea in a glass bowl so that we could watch the infusion process together and watch we did, all clustered together watching the flowers drift slowly down through the  yellow-green liquid the water had become.  The flowers seemed a little unearthly somehow, possessing of an alternate life that we could witness but not control.

I strained the hot liquid a couple of times before decanting into cups and flavouring with our homegrown honey, honey that was probably made in part from last year’s Elderflower crop.  A happy circle indeed.

We sipped the beverage (some with more enthusiasm than others), adding honey to taste and enjoying the pleasing smell of the steaming liquid.  But it was the very fact that this tea had come, not half and hour prior, from the bushes growing on our own land, that pleased me the most.  Our connection to the earth around us reinforced a little more and teaching the boys more in a moment than a thousand words could do.