Tea Season

"There are few hours in life more agreeable," Henry James once observed, "than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea." Charleston in the spring is happy to oblige James' opinion with the many church tea rooms that appear between Easter and the start of downtown's Spoleto performing arts festival in late May.

The tea room tradition can be traced back seventy-five years ago, to 1948, when a group of women belonging to Old St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in West Ashley were tasked with cleaning out the church's sanctuary, long neglected due to falling attendance at Sunday services. The ladies fortified themselves each day with homemade box lunches and jugs of iced and hot tea.

Old St. Andrews tea servers, c.1974

Soon passersby began commenting on the delicious sandwiches and pastries on view. The fundraising possibilities were not lost on the women, and soon a tea room was established to raise money for refurbishing the sanctuary. The idea caught on at other churches, and today these seasonal tea rooms raise thousands of dollars for philanthropic purposes or for church repairs.

In addition to enjoying such Lowcountry delights as ham biscuits and okra soup, hummingbird cake and Lady Baltimore cake and Tipsy Pudding, the tea rooms offer a relaxing way to visit some of downtown's historic churches and help maintain them. If you'd like to experience this unique and charming Charleston tradition, here are churches offering tea rooms this spring:

• The St. Phillips Tea Room, 142 Church Street: April 29 - May 4. Monday-Friday 11:30am to 2pm. 843-722-7734 stphillipschurchsc.org

• Second Presbyterian Church, 342 Meeting St., May 20 - 26, Friday-Saturday, 11:30am-2pm and Sunday, 12:30-3pm. 843-723-9237. 2ndpc,org

• Grace Church, 98 Wentworth St., May 27 - June 1st and June 3 - 8, 11:30-2pm. 843-723-4575 gracechurchcharleston.org

(Photos courtesy the Post&Courier and Charleston Magazine)

Blue Bloods

With spring now well underway, our beaches become prime destinations for a host of newly active marine life, from nesting loggerhead turtles to migrating red knots. Often overlooked, though, are the animals that have lived on earth longer than almost any other species - horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus), which begin coming ashore in great numbers during the late spring and early summer to mate and lay eggs.

A horseshoe crab fossil from the early Triassic period

They aren't crabs, of course, but arthropods related to spiders and scorpions, which first appeared in the fossil records of 400-million years ago, surviving shifting continents, ice ages and dinosaurs to earn the nickname "living fossils." Despite their formidable appearance, especially the long whip-like tail, horseshoe crabs are harmless and stingless. The tail is used to right themselves if they become flipped over by surf.

Red knots and other migrating birds depend on the crabs' fat and protein-rich eggs to bulk up before continuing on to summer nesting sites; loggerheads, particularly egg-bearing females, prey on them for their calcium-rich exoskeltons. And humans have harvested them as fertilizer and cattle feed, but

Copper gives the crab's blood its distinctive blue color

especially prize them nowadays for their copper-laden blue blood, which contains a chemical used as a component of vaccines and intravenous medicines to detect toxic impurities. If you've received any vaccination or infusion, you have horseshoe crabs to thank for the drugs' safety.

Our Atlantic horseshoe crabs belong to one of four species found throughout the world. Along with their useful blood, another unique feature is a set of ten eyes - two compound eyes on the top of the shell, with more photoreceptive cells than any other animal, and eight simpler eyes around the shell's perimeter which are sensitive to the length of daylight and to ultraviolet light, giving horseshoe crabs exceptional night vision and allowing them to minimize predation by being most active at night.

In May and June, especially on full-moon nights, males and females come ashore in great numbers to mate. Each female lays about 4,000 eggs in each of multiple nests she digs in the sand between high and low tide marks. Two to four weeks later, the hatchlings claw their way out of the sand at high tide, to be carried out to deeper water where they'll live on the seabed during multiple moltings as they grow to adult size.

Harvesting for biomedical use

Although horseshoe crabs are not considered endangered, harvesting them for their blood is somewhat controversial, even though only a third of the blood is removed from each animal before it's returned to the ocean, where the lost blood is regenerated in about a week. But disrupting populations on beaches and tidal marshes, however temporarily, can affect the food supply upon which other migrating and nesting species depend. South Carolina's DNR and federal wildlife officials are considering denying permits for harvesting at the Cape Romaine Wildlife Refuge to the north, and permanent bans are in place on several islands that form part of the ACE Basin to the south. With spawning season just around the corner, harvesting's future continues under negotiation.

Whose Hair Is It?

There's an amusing story about one of the South's most emblematic sights, one so common that Lowcountry residents hardly notice it. During the Spanish - French exploration and rivalry for control of Lowcountry ports in the 17th century, French explorers asked their Native American guides about the scraggly growths dangling from live oaks and bald cypresses. Their guides' name for it translated as "tree hair", prompting the French to think of the ragged beards many of their Spanish rivals sported and leading them to name the stuff "barbe espagnol". The Spanish, on the other hand, preferred to call it "cabello francés"; but it was the French explorers' name that stuck and that, over the centuries, morphed into Spanish Moss.

An eastern Phoebe checks out nesting material

Spanish Moss (Tillandsia usneoides), of course, is neither Spanish in origin nor a member of the moss family. Its closest relatives are bromeliads. It's common throughout the South and Southeast, as far south as Argentina and, to the north, Virginia. Nor is it a parasite, as commonly believed, but a flowering epiphyte that attaches itself to live oaks, cypresses and sweetgums but obtains its own nutrients and water from the air around it and from rain. It has no roots, produces tiny green or yellow flowers, and propagates itself via wind-borne seeds or fragments that break off and are carried by wind or by birds to surrounding trees. Also contrary to popular belief, the plant doesn't harm its host tree in any way, although thick populations on one tree may affect the amount of sun the tree receives and thus slow its growth.

During the Depression, sterilized Spanish Moss provided income as mattress stuffing.

Both humans and animals have found uses for Spanish Moss. Birds and squirrels use it to to line their nests; snakes, bats and spiders find it makes a congenial home or resting place. In Gullah-Geechee culture, it's said that putting fresh green Spanish Moss in one's shoes relieves high blood pressure; made into a poultice, it can be used to heal wounds, lower fevers and relieve chills. The plant's been used at various times as building insulation, padding for car seats and even as an ingredient in the manufacture of wallpaper. During the Depression, it was picked clean, steamed for sterilization, and used as mattress stuffing.

And there's one other story about Spanish Moss' origins, shorn of nationalistic jargon. It's the story of "The Meanest Man Who Ever Lived", who was so mean that no one wanted to cut his hair. It grew so long, it began to get caught on trees and gave us yet another name for the plant - Old Man's Beard.