The Orchard, first planted in 1868, became a Tea Garden purely by chance. A group of Cambridge students asked Mrs Stevenson of Orchard House if she would serve them tea beneath the blossoming fruit trees rather than, as was usual, on the front lawn of the House. They were unaware that, on that spring morning in 1897, they had started a great Cambridge tradition. The students enjoyed their rural tea, and word spread around the colleges.
Here, at Orchard House, Rupert Brooke took up residence in 1909 before moving next door to the Old Vicarage. He had moved out of Cambridge, hoping to escape his hectic social life there, but in vain. The charismatic young Brooke drew a constant stream of visitors, and eventually became the centre of a circle of friends, later dubbed by Virginia Woolf the Neo-Pagans. So the Rupert Brooke Society and the Rupert Brooke Museum could have no better home or setting.
Brooke had fallen in love with his idyllic life in Grantchester, and, while in a homesick mood on a trip to Berlin, wrote one of his best-known poems, The Old Vicarage, Grantchester, the famous final lines immortalizing afternoon tea in The Orchard:
Stands the church clock at ten-to-three
And is there honey still for tea?
Today the Tea Garden is still open. Over morning coffee or a light luncheon, you can soak up the atmosphere of a bygone age or follow the footsteps of generations by sharing in the great English tradition of afternoon tea.