It is cultivated for its stalks and foliage, which are used for tea, as a vegetable, and to flavour foods, particularly meats.
An advocate of what he calls "edible landscapes," he fills flower beds with the spiky gray-green foliage of artichokes rather than the tea roses that are as common here as steaming glasses of sweet mint tea.
He brews tea from stinging nettle and sprays it on foliage to ward off disease.
Tea makes an excellent hedge, its glossy, evergreen foliage creating a dense, verdant wall if regularly picked.
Cottage gardens are always associated with roses: shrub roses, climbing roses, and old garden roses with lush foliage, in contrast to the gangly modern hybrid tea roses.
For biotic treatments, two larvae of tea geometrids (Ectropis obliqua Prout) starved for 24 h were placed on the foliage for feeding damage, and the damaged leaves were harvested after 6, 12, 24, 48, 72 and 96 hours.
Every few miles on our way to a hike in the Edmund Forest Reserve, Bernard would pull over and go crashing into the dense wall of foliage, emerging with cinnamon, coffee beans, mangoes and a "wannabe plant" that tasted by turns like clove, tea and basil.
Tea olive, a plant of the genus Osmanthus in the family Oleaceae, often grown for its fragrant flowers and shining, evergreen foliage.
Foliage, galtonflowers.com.
