There is ginger in this cup, and no ginger plant has ever been found growing wild. Anywhere. It doesn't propagate from seed in any reliable way — it spreads from pieces of root, which means every ginger on earth is a division of an earlier plant, handed on. The one in your cup is a continuous living fragment of something people started tending before writing existed. It has no home to return to. It exists because it was carried.

Today's cup: Lemon Myrtle & Ginger — lemongrass, lemon myrtle, ginger, calendula petals. 1 tsp, 200mL, 100°C, four minutes. It takes a second infusion.

Before It Begins is made by Impala & Peacock Artisan Teas, blended by hand in Melbourne. This week's cup is waiting for you at https://www.impalaandpeacock.com.au/collections/best-sellers

A tea and musing every weekday morning.

One leaf in this cup is more concentrated than anything else in the blend — press a piece between your fingers before it goes in the pot and the smell is almost too much. It was given its botanical name in 1853. The food industry discovered it in the 1990s. People in southeast Queensland had been using it as food, as medicine and as smoke for tens of thousands of years before either. All three are true at once. It depends entirely on where you start counting.

Today's cup: Lemon Myrtle & Ginger — lemongrass, lemon myrtle, ginger, calendula petals. 1 tsp, 200mL, 100°C, four minutes. It takes a second infusion.

Before It Begins is made by Impala & Peacock Artisan Teas, blended by hand in Melbourne. This week's cup is waiting for you at https://www.impalaandpeacock.com.au/collections/best-sellers

A tea and musing every weekday morning.

There is no lemon in this cup. No fruit at all. The brightness is citral — a compound that turns up independently in a grass from Southeast Asia and in the leaf of a rainforest tree on the east coast of Australia. Two plants that never met, arriving separately at the same answer. And a lemon that isn't the original, only the one that got there first in our language.

Today's cup: Lemon Myrtle & Ginger — lemongrass, lemon myrtle, ginger, calendula petals. 1 tsp, 200mL, 100°C, four minutes. It takes a second infusion.

Before It Begins is made by Impala & Peacock Artisan Teas, blended by hand in Melbourne. This week's cup is waiting for you at https://www.impalaandpeacock.com.au/collections/best-sellers

A tea and musing every weekday morning.