1. A garden or open-air enclosure, connected with a house of entertainment, where ten and other refreshments are served.
1802. Picture of London, 370. Shepherd and Shepherdess Tea Gardens, &c., City Road…. Much frequented in the summer time by tea parties, &c.
1829. De Vega, Jrnl. Tour, ix. (1847), 81. A charge of three-pence is demanded on entering the delightful ‘Tea Gardens.’
1900. Daily News, 12 Nov., 6/3. Tea garden resorts … have entirely vanished.
2. A plantation in which tea-plants are grown. (Cf. hop-garden.)
1882. Spons, Encycl. Manuf., v. 1994. There is scarcely a tea-garden but what is mainly filled with hybrids … between these two species [Thea chinensis and T. assamica].
1888. J. Paton, in Encycl. Brit., XXIII. 98/2. Undulating well-watered tracks … are the most valuable for tea gardens.
Hence Tea-gardened a., having a tea-garden; Tea-gardener, the keeper of, or a worker in, a tea-garden; Tea-gardeny a., colloq. resembling, or having the style of, a tea-garden (sense 1).
1843. Thackeray, Irish Sk.-Bk., vii. What a prim,… green-railinged, tea-gardened, gravel-walked place would it have been.
1862. G. H. Kingsley, Sport & Trav. (1900), 368. The public gardens, small and insignificant enough, indeed a little tea-gardeny.
1879. Dickens’s Dict. Thames (1880), 120/2. There is little … of the ancient abbey to be found among the present tea-gardeny ruins.
1903. Daily Chron., 16 Sept., 6/7. Miura, a [Japanese] tea gardener, assures his young and pretty wife Obana that she is unsightly.
