Behind the cottage where Bea Iverson has lived for thirty-one years, in the village of Helmsley in north Yorkshire, there is a square bed of perennial herbs that measures eight feet by eight feet. It is bordered by old brick on three sides and a low stone wall on the fourth, and it holds six plants. Iverson has not added or removed anything from it since 2014.
The six are lemon balm, peppermint, lemon verbena, anise hyssop, chamomile, and bergamot. Iverson chose them because they make tea, because they survive a Yorkshire winter without intervention, and because the combinations among them can produce a different drink for almost every day of the year.
The bed faces south-west and gets sun from late morning until early evening in summer. The soil is a heavy loam that has been improved with leaf mold and well-rotted manure across two decades. Drainage is adequate but not perfect, which suits the lemon balm and the bergamot and is a small ongoing problem for the lemon verbena.
The lemon verbena is the only plant in the bed that is not strictly hardy in Helmsley. Iverson treats it as a half-hardy perennial: she mulches it heavily with bracken in November, drapes it with horticultural fleece during hard frosts, and accepts that it dies back to the ground each winter. It returns in late May, slowly, and reaches a useful size by July. In a hard winter it fails, and she replaces it. This has happened four times in eleven years.
The lemon balm, Melissa officinalis, is the workhorse of the bed. It is the first to leaf out in March, the last to die back in November, and the most generous in its harvest. Iverson cuts it three times a year. The first cutting in late May produces the freshest, most lemon-forward tea. The second in late July produces a richer, slightly mintier infusion. The third in early September produces leaves that dry well for winter use.
Lemon balm self-seeds aggressively, and Iverson removes seedlings ruthlessly from elsewhere in the garden. In the tea bed itself she allows two or three replacement seedlings each year and culls the original plants when they grow woody, which usually happens after four or five seasons.
The peppermint occupies its own corner of the bed, sunk in a bottomless terracotta pot to contain the runners. Iverson does this not because peppermint is impossible to control but because it is impossible to share a bed with. The pot is twelve inches deep and ten inches across, buried so the rim sits an inch above the soil, and the mint inside is divided and refreshed every third spring.
She uses Mentha x piperita 'Mitcham', the old English peppermint, which she considers better for tea than the showier modern selections. The flavor is cleaner, the menthol balanced, and the leaves dry without losing color.
The anise hyssop, Agastache foeniculum, is the bed's surprise. It looks like a perennial native to the American prairies, which it is, but it tolerates the Yorkshire climate without complaint, blooms in lavender spikes from July through September, and produces leaves with a clean licorice-mint flavor that combine beautifully with lemon balm. Iverson harvests both leaves and flower spikes, drying the spikes whole for a winter tea that holds the anise note longer than the leaves alone.
The chamomile is the German annual species, Matricaria recutita, which technically does not belong in a perennial bed. Iverson lets it self-seed at the front edge of the bed and treats the patch as if it were perennial. New plants come up every May from the previous year's seed, and she has not sown chamomile since 2017.
She harvests the flowers daily in June and July, snipping them with small scissors into a wide flat basket, and dries them on screens in the airing cupboard. A summer's harvest produces about four ounces of dried flowers, which is enough for a cup of chamomile tea every other night through the winter.
The bergamot, Monarda didyma, is the bed's tallest plant and its most visually generous. It produces the brilliant red flower heads from late June through August, and the leaves carry the distinctive citrus-thyme flavor that gives the plant its common name and that has nothing to do with the bergamot orange of Earl Grey. Iverson uses the leaves for tea and the flower petals as a garnish in summer drinks. The plant is prone to powdery mildew in damp Yorkshire summers, and Iverson manages it by thinning the stems aggressively in early June to improve airflow.
Her tea-making practice through the year follows the bed. In May she makes single-herb infusions of fresh lemon balm and fresh peppermint, separately, because the freshness of the new growth deserves to be tasted alone. In June and July she begins blending: lemon balm with chamomile in the morning, anise hyssop with peppermint after dinner. In August the bergamot leaves go into a blend with lemon verbena and lemon balm that becomes the household's iced tea through the hottest weeks.
In September she dries everything she can. The drying is done on stacked wooden screens in the airing cupboard, with the door slightly ajar for airflow. The leaves dry in four to seven days depending on weather. She stores them in glass jars in a cupboard away from light, labeled by variety and year, and she does not blend them until the moment of use.
From October through April the tea is made from dried leaves and flowers, supplemented by whatever the lemon balm is willing to provide on a mild week.
Iverson keeps a small notebook of blends that have worked. Lemon balm and chamomile in equal parts, for sleep. Peppermint and anise hyssop, two to one, for after a heavy meal. Bergamot leaf and lemon verbena and a pinch of dried chamomile, for a long quiet afternoon in February. Lemon balm alone, fresh, for the first warm morning in April.
The bed produces, by Iverson's rough count, about four hundred cups of tea a year. It costs her perhaps two hours of work each month from March through October and nothing at all from November through February. It has paid for itself a thousand times over, if such things can be calculated.
Visitors sometimes ask her whether she would expand the bed. There is room. The neighboring strip of lawn could become a second tea garden of equal size, with linden flowers and rose hips and the more demanding southern herbs.
Iverson says she has thought about it and decided against. Six is enough. Six is, she says, exactly the number she can remember to harvest.
The kettle is on most mornings by six. The bed, in May, is full of bees.