ISSUE 59, CURIOSITIES, Part 5: Tea Olive Honey
Tea Olive Honey
In the South we are blessed with a number of honey varieties perfumed with the nectar of aromatic trees and cover crops: the tupelo (although hurricane Michael wrecked many of the trees in Florida), sourwood, orange blossom, and buckwheat. But I’ve never seen honey from the most aromatic of all landscape trees, the tea olive, Osmanthus fragrans. There is an almost suffocating plushness to its voluptuous fragrance. It is the aroma of Blanche Dubois as she approaches a stranger whom she hopes might be kind. Is there no honey because the tree is so aromatic that one or two per yard suffices to make the air aromatic? Are plantings not dense enough to allow honey production?
There is a tea olive a half bock away. It was festooned with tiny white blossoms and pouring off a fragrance that charged our nostrils a half a block away. Close up I was surprised to see the tree wasn’t covered with honey bees. Instead, there were some small Native wasps. So I e-mailed a local apiarist. “The bees don’t usually harvest autumn blooming tea olive trees. But there is also an April bloom of Osmanthus fragrans, and the bees go after that.” I asked if anyone made tea olive honey. “I guess you could make it if you had a nursery of tea olive trees, but I never heard of any.”
So . . . bee people . . . if you want a product rarer than sourwood honey, and more lushly fragrant than orange blossom honey . . . time to start planting a grove of Osmanthus f. I bet you could name your own price for a pint. How do I know? I just looked up the purchase price of tea olive honey from its Chinese home in Hua Tung. $$$$
Of course there are less pricey ways to enjoy the splendor. Making a flower of the jam, or making an infusion of Tea Olive blossoms in simply syrup afford a cheaper path to pleasure.