Come to Tea: An Elegant Garden Gathering – Food
Come to Tea: An Elegant Garden Gathering
Debbie Rodgers
Perhaps nothing says "garden party" like having afternoon tea outdoors. Its a charming reminder of bygone days and childhood make-believe. Outdoor spaces of all kinds, including balconies, can be successfully adapted to a tea party.
Tea parties span generations and will be enjoyed by your most sophisticated women friends or all the giggling little girls of your acquaintance.
What makes an elegant tea party Look at these factors.
Flowers
Plan to hold your tea party when your garden is in its fullest bloom -- perhaps its lilac time, June roses, or peony season. Be sure to cut some of the blooms for the tea table vases. If you dont have a garden, buy an armful of flowers at a farmers market or stop by a country ditch and pick bunches of wild daisies and Queen Annes lace.
Invitations
Send handwritten notes by snail mail. Your guests will recognize your party as an elegant affair and dress accordingly! Typically, tea is held around 4 p.m. -- perfect for day-blooming flowers. Include an invitation for the little ones to bring along a doll or teddy friend.
Table Setting
The more elegant, the better. Stash the paper table covering and the plastic glasses just for today. Instead, use a crisp linen tablecloth, pressed cloth napkins and your best bone china cups and saucers. If its a little girls party, you might want to invest in two or three miniature tea sets.
Try to have adequate seating for everyone. Consider setting your straight-back indoor dining chairs outdoors. They can add an elegant touch, whether left unadorned or covered with flowered chintz.
Hats
Encourage all of your guests to wear hats -- big-brimmed, floppy and flowered. If the party is for little girls, collect old hats, scarves and silk flowers at a thrift shop, yard sale or discount store. Make decorating the hats a fun activity at the party. You can also include a box of flowery cast-offs for dressing up. Include "grown-up" shoes and old jewellery -- anything that will make the little ones feel elegant. Tea time is a fun way to introduce young ones to "elegant party" manners.
Food
Other than teaspoons, no cutlery should be required at tea. All sandwiches and sweets should be dainty finger-food. Try sandwiches of watercress, cucumber, or egg with the crusts removed and cut in quarters. Sugar cookies and petit fours are traditional sweets. You can substitute mini-cupcakes or tiny tarts.
Tea
One of the first things that I learned in seventh grade home economics class was how to brew a proper pot of hot tea, but that was many years ago. I suspect that tea-making is becoming a lost art.
Tea is actually the common name of one plant: Camillia sinesis. The three basic types of tea -- black, green and oolong -- are distinguished by the amount of oxidization that the tea leaves have undergone. The more than 3,000 varieties of tea in the world are all derived from those three basic types.
Herbal teas -- more properly, tisane or infusion -- are made from a wide variety of flowers, herbs, barks, berries, fruits and spices.
At a minimum, offer your guests a traditional tea and a caffeine-free herbal choice. Have milk not cream!, sugar and fresh lemon wedges available.
So, dust off your teacups and your manners and sit down with your girlfriends for a proper tea party. Its a lovely summer interlude!
About The Author
Debbie Rodgers, the haven maven, owns and operates Paradise Porch, and is dedicated to helping people create outdoor living spaces that nurture and enrich them. Her latest how-to guide
Japanese Garden of Monaco – Travel
Japanese Garden of Monaco
Laura Ciocan
Have you ever seen an authentic Japanese garden Well, I had the chance of seeing the one in Monaco and was really impressed too. Wanna taste a little Japanese culture Stepping on this ground is escaping from the real world into a fantasy land. You suddenly find yourself in a typical Japanese natural setting like the ones you see in marvelous paintings. The only thing thats missing is the fog. Instead, the Mediterranean sun reveals all minute details in a warm light.
With Japanese gardens, what you see is not all; the surface of things is the mere reflection of the psyche of an ancient culture. One really needs to be literally "cultured" in this direction to best appreciate the value of this art. which I myself was not at the time of my visit! And it was a pitty as I did not know what to look for and what to analyse better! One can speak of a philosophy of gardening coming from the ancient Japan. Japanese gardening is an art fetched beyond the arrangements of vegetation, water and stone but is full of symbols:
Koko - the veneration of timeless age;
Shizen - the avoidance of the artificial;
Yugen, or darkness - imply the mysterious or subtle;
Miegakure - the avoidance of full expression
The perception of nature is different in the Japanese culture from that of the European one. Instead of viewing nature only as something to be subjugated and transformed according to men-made ideal of beauty, Japanese developed a close connection to nature, considering it sacred, an ally in putting food on the table and an ideal of beauty in itself. That is why the Japanese gardens are the synthesis of nature in miniature instead of correction of nature as with European gardens.
Actually, the design of Japanese gardens come from the Chinese model. The history goes back in time, around year 100BC when the emperor of China, Wu Di of the Han Dynasty established a garden that contained three small islands, mimicking the Isles of the Immortals, who were the principle Taoist deities. An envoy of Japan saw it and took the idea to Japan, improving the existing Japanese practices.
The Japanese Garden of Monaco was designed at the request of Prince Rainier who thus fulfilled a desire Princesse Grace had expressed during her life-time. The garden was designed by the landscape-architect Yasuo Beppu, has 7,000 square meter, its construction took 3 years and it was inaugurated in 1994.
There are some specific elements:
The wall He
Release Some Tension…Spend Some Time In Your Garden – Home
Release Some Tension...Spend Some Time In Your Garden
Mike Yeager
Gardening can be one of the most rewarding and relaxing hobbies that you can engage in. Picture a beautiful spring day, the sweet smell of grass in the air and you get to go out and work the soil and prepare your garden. One of the fascinating things about gardening is that you can start with a small seed and grow anything you want.
Whether you