How about a cuppa?

Washington Post: Just Their Cup of Tea: British Cultivate Their Own---

TRURO, England -- Beyond the four-mile-long driveway, and the shaded path named "Lady's Walk" and the soft fields of purple rhododendron and grazing Holstein cows, Jonathan Jones walked among waist-high rows of rich green plants. With loving precision, he plucked off two perfect green leaves and a bud and held them proudly in his hand.

"English tea should be grown on English soil," he said, running his fingers over what he called a victory for horticulture and also for British culture: the first commercial crop of tea ever grown in this tea-mad nation.

Since the days of the British Empire, traders have been bringing tea home from India, China and other faraway lands where climate and labor costs allowed cultivation to thrive. The average person here still drinks at least two cups a day. But now, on a 670-year-old estate in southwest England, Jones and an aristocrat who counts Earl Grey as an ancestor are opening a new era in British tea production.

"It is rather nice to produce the very first locally grown cup of tea," said Evelyn Boscawen, a shy gardening enthusiast whose family has owned the vast Tregothnan estate for centuries. "It's fun, exciting, new."
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While a relatively small crop of homegrown tea will hardly take over the huge market, "consumers will be intrigued," said William Gorman, executive director of the Tea Council, an independent group based in London dedicated to promoting tea. He noted that tea is serious business in Britain, where children grow up knowing the difference between a cream tea (a pot with a plate of scones, clotted cream and jam) and high tea (more of a meal).
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But no matter what is going on elsewhere in the world, the British feel a deep cultural connection to tea. "It's a habitual comfort here," said Gorman, who calculates that Britain's 60 million people drink more tea than North America, Canada and continental Europe combined. "Drinking tea is like breathing."

Read the rest (and have a cup of tea).