Date/Time
Date(s) - 14/02/2025
7:30 pm
Location
Kilmington Village Hall
Categories
Andrea Rye, Plants Manager at Combe Garden Centre, is a self-confessed plant fanatic and her enthusiasm and knowledge shone through her talk on Friday, 14th February, the subject being ‘Plants that make drinks’. If the audience was expecting hints on how to use plants for healthy infusions or herbal tisanes, they were in for a surprise! There is a colourful history dating back thousands of years to the use of plants as drinks, starting with beer.
Barley, a member of the grass family of plants, was used to make beer in the ancient Sumerian land between the Tigris and Euphrates (modern-day Iraq).There were 8 or 9 different types of beer, and it became a huge part of society, with women (brewsters) being largely responsible for brewing the beer. They even had a goddess of beer, Ninkasi! The ancient Egyptians were also very fond of beer, indeed there are hieroglyphs of people getting blind drunk. Andrea regaled us with lurid descriptions of the exploits of the drunks.
Plus çachange…. The Greeks and Romans were similarly fond of beer but there was a lot of snobbery associated with the consumption of beer, where the more aristocratic Romans drank wine. Which brings us to vines – Vitis vinifera–cultivated from about 5000 BC, in Georgia and Armenia.
In ancient Greece, a symposium was a formal gathering for drinking, eating, and socialising. Symposia were often held in private homes and wine was served to show the hospitality of the host and thus display wealth and sophistication.Wine for guests would be watered down! The possibilities of wine were further explored when distillation was used. It was already in use for preparing perfumes andoils in Mesopotamia but it began to be used for transforming wine into aqua vitae using an alembic during the Middle Ages.Sugar cane originated in New Guineaand was domesticated in India in 4000 BC. It requires a temperature of 24° to grow and it is very labour intensive.
Sugar first came to England in the 11th century, brought back bysoldiers returning from the Crusades in what is now the Middle East. Over the next 500 years it remained a rarefied luxury, until Portuguese colonists began producing it at a more industrial level in Brazil during the 1500s. Sugar formed one side of the infamous triangle of New World raw materials, along with European manufactured goods, and African slaves. Coffee is a pretty evergreen shrub with open branches and white flowers, which smell like jasmine. Coffea arabicais the most popular coffee variety as it has a sweeter taste and accounts for 60-80% of global production whereas Coffea canephora(Robusta) has a higher caffeine content.
Travellers to the Orient returned to Europe describing coffee and its effects, thought to be medicinal. However, in the 17th centurycoffee began to be served in Oxford coffee houses and became places for men from all walks of life to meet to discuss topics of the day. It is fair to say that coffee had a huge social impact both in England and all over Europe. Had she not run out of time Andrea would have gone on to mention a few more plants such as tea and coca. It is safe to say that all the plants highlighted by Andrea have considerably influenced the culture and everyday existence of the Western world.