December 1, 2006
Rosehips: Tiny Berries with Big Flavor!
Rosehips are an important ingredient in herb teas, and Celestial Seasonings purchases thousands of pounds of these small red berries every year. For more than 30 years, we’ve been buying our rosehips in Chile, where the berries are wild-crafted—meaning that they grow in the wild instead of being cultivated on farms.
Pickers from many different communities harvest the berries and then bring them to a central collection point, where the pickers are paid by weight for their berries. After collection, the berries are spread out on huge wooden racks to let most of the moisture evaporate, and then they’re loaded into eucalyptus-fed ovens to be gently but thoroughly dried.
Rosehips sweeten as they mature on the bush. Many European tea companies prefer their rosehips to have a tart taste, but at Celestial Seasonings we like them to be a little sweeter. This means leaving them on the bush a little longer to let the flavor fully develop. The timing is critical: if you pick the berries too early, they’ll be tart, but if you leave them on the bush too long, you could hit the rainy season and the berries could be ruined.
An Eventful Trip
In 1985, a colleague and I traveled together to Chile to make a large purchase of rosehips. We spent the first night of our trip in Santiago, before heading south to the area where rosehips grow in great quantities. During the night, an earthquake registering 7.8 on the Richter Scale hit the area, causing incredible damage from Santiago to Valparaíso and beyond. The hotel actually withstood the earthquake very well—my room had a crack in the wall, but otherwise there was no significant damage. Outside Santiago, it was another story. In the morning, we boarded a small plane to fly south to the rosehip fields, and the damage to the ports and smaller cities along the way was quite extensive.
When we arrived at our destination, we mounted horses to ride through the fields to inspect the rosehips. We could see massive storm clouds in the distance, and soon we were riding in a torrential downpour. The area was quite hilly and the horses lost their footing on a few occasions. My colleague from New York had never been on a horse before, so this was a pretty frightening introduction!
We arrived just at the beginning of the rainy season, so the rosehips we purchased were just the right level of sweetness and were able to be dried for transport to the U.S. We’d run into a few glitches getting to the rosehips, but the harvest itself was a great success. We traveled back to Santiago feeling satisfied that we had secured the best possible ingredients for our tea, and feeling like nothing else could possibly go wrong.
How wrong we were! That evening, as I prepared to tuck into my farewell coconut pudding in the hotel restaurant, there was a huge blast outside the hotel that shattered all the glass in the building and sent the hotel patrons running for cover. The hotel was located on a plaza between a government building and the Chilean Press Building, which was the target of guerillas working against the then-leader of Chile, Augusto Pinochet. A car filled with explosives had been parked outside the Press Building. The detonation of the bomb caused extensive damage and some injuries, but thankfully the insurgents were reluctant to harm civilians and set the bomb off during a strict curfew when there weren’t many people about.
I don’t know that I’ve ever been happier to go home. The success of the rosehip harvest had been blemished by events that caused great damage to the beautiful country of Chile and tragedy for many of its people. My travels have taken me to faraway places and exposed to me great wonder and beauty, but my memories of this trip always make me appreciate home.
