{"id":386,"date":"2014-12-30T14:39:09","date_gmt":"2014-12-30T13:39:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/?p=386"},"modified":"2025-08-16T16:24:35","modified_gmt":"2025-08-16T14:24:35","slug":"greek-mountain-tea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/?p=386","title":{"rendered":"Greek Mountain Tea \/ Sideritis syriaca"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0I visited an ex-colleague in Athens, Greece some 20 years ago. He offered me tea of a plant I didn’t know. \u00a0He called it mountain tea from the Greek \u00a0\u03c4\u03c3\u03ac\u03b9 \u03c4\u03bf\u03c5 \u03b2\u03bf\u03c5\u03bd\u03bf\u03cd… \u00a0<\/b>He told me it was one of the two most popular herbal teas in Greece, used both for pleasure and to prevent colds. \u00a0Looking it up in a book on the flowers\u00a0of Crete, \u00a0where he was from, it turned out to be Sideritis syriaca. \u00a0At the time I’d never heard of it and was puzzled as to why one of Greece’s most prized herb teas wasn’t known in Northern Europe. After all, most of our herbs originate in the Mediterranean countries. \u00a0I searched for seed and in the early days of the Internet I traded some with someone in Italy.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"OLYMPUS<\/a><\/p>\n

To my surprise, the resultant aromatic plants thrived in my garden in a dry well drained spot. \u00a0Not that surprising as I found out that the plant was usually wild harvested high up in the White Mountains of Crete (ssp. syriaca, despite its name), an area with not that dissimilar a climate to where I live. \u00a0I concluded that perhaps this herb was easier for me to\u00a0grow than further south in Europe, not liking wet winter conditions. This theory was strengthened when my first plants died one w\u00a0inter after I had removed a tree which had kept the place I was growing it dry….and subsequent replants also died\u00a0. However, I have seen it in botanical gardens in recent years (Wisley and Hilliers in England) as well as Copenhagen and \u00c5rhus (Denmark) and G\u00f8teborg (Gothenburg). I alslo saw it growing in the Troms\u00f8 Botanical Garden at close to 70 deg. N in Norway. The herb also started to become available particularly in Germany (the German wiki page is particularly informative: http:\/\/de.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Syrisches_Gliedkraut) and elsewhere where there are Greek markets such as in New York.<\/p>\n

If you’ve succeeded with this herb, please let me know!!<\/p>\n

In 2010 I found that another gardener here in Malvik had managed to keep one of the original plants I’d given her alive:<\/span><\/p>\n

\"OLYMPUS<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0Here in the Troms\u00f8 Botanical Gardens in 2009:<\/span><\/p>\n

\"OLYMPUS<\/a><\/p>\n

\"P1410951\"<\/a>
14th June 2015 with Geranium lucidum<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It turns out that there are a number of other closely related species also used as herbal tea including S. scardica (Mursalski or\u00a0Olympus Tea), S. cretica (Crete Mountain Tea, actually from Tenerife!) and (below) S. trojana seen in the Mediterranean garden at Kew \"OLYMPUSGardens:<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0I visited an ex-colleague in Athens, Greece some 20 years ago. He offered me tea of a plant I didn’t know. \u00a0He called it mountain tea from the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14,5],"tags":[246],"class_list":["post-386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-herbs","category-perennials","tag-sideritis-syriaca"],"views":17768,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=386"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33920,"href":"http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386\/revisions\/33920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}