Ingredients
- 1 tablespoon dehydrated honeysuckle flowers
- 1 tablespoon dehydrated chrysanthemum flowers
- 1 tablespoon dehydrated lemon zest
- 4 to 5 cups boiling water
- 1 tablespoon honey
Instructions
- Rinse the pot out with boiling water and tip it away before anything goes in. Cold crockery pulls enough heat from the water to leave the flowers floating unopened on top.
- Put the honeysuckle, chrysanthemum and lemon zest in loosely, using a basket rather than a ball. Dried flowers swell to several times their packed size and a tight ball holds them shut.
- Pour the boiling water over and leave it standing for a good twenty minutes. Chrysanthemum is slow to open, and the zest needs time before the oil in the skin comes out of it.
- Reheat in the pot if it has gone cold, but stop well short of boiling. Flower tea that has been boiled goes flat and faintly hay-like.
- Stir the honey in at the end, off the heat and in the cup. Honey held at a boil loses the character you added it for and leaves you with plain sweetness.
- Keep the dry flowers in a tin in a dark cupboard and use them within the year. Light is what bleaches a petal, and a bleached petal has already given up most of its scent.
