Monday February 19, 2007 | 6 comments
What is tea?
Camellia Sinensis
Tea is consumed world-wide on every continent and in almost every country. While the method and style of tea service varies from Russia to Japan, Senegal to Sri Lanka and beyond, the common element is the tea plant, Camellia sinensis. All tea varieties come from this evergreen shrub.
What It Looks Like
Characterized by a woody stem, delicate white flowers and waxy leaves with serrated-edges, some plants are actually tree-like in form and reach heights of over 60 feet in the wild. However, when cultivated for harvest, bushes are maintained at a height of approximately 3 feet. Producing raw tea leaves for tea making entails plucking soft new growth and regular pruning to maintain the plants’ ideal shape. The shape of the cultivated tea bushes ranges from softly rounded mounds in Japan to flat-topped, uneven rows in India and variations in between.
Tea Varieties
The same tea bush can produce many varieties of tea, ranging from white to puerh. It is the plucking and processing that determines the final variety. While it is theoretically possible for a tea estate to produce all varieties of tea, as a matter of practice, each estate and each region specializes in a particular tea. Russia, Sri Lanka, Kenya, and India produce black teas. Taiwan and the Fujian Province of China take pride in their oolong teas. Japan produces green teas and a roasted red tea. Until recently white teas were exclusively produced in China. India has recently begun producing a white tea marketed under the name “Darjeeling Silver Tips.†Puerh tea is manufactured in China from black tea which is compressed into round cake-like shapes and then stored in damp, humid caves and allowed to ferment and grow mold, much like blue cheese.
For what is NOT tea, read more in Part 2.
Well put up for the common man to understand!
Good Job!
Ankit Lochan
I’m really grateful for this basic information which (I’m guessing) many of us didn’t know. I imagined the different types of teas were different cultivars of a family of tea plants, not simply varied processes of harvesting one plant. Your photos of the rows of bushes and close up of the blossoming camellia sinensis was also enlightening. Doe’s the flower produce a viable seed or fruit? Frankly, it’s amazing how little we learn about the food/beverage plants that are all too familiar to us as culinary ingredients. Think about all the spices in our daily cuisine……..what do we really know about how they are grown, harvested and come from distant lands to our pantries.
I would beg to differ here. While theoritically it may be possible to produce every kind of tea from every tea bush, practically it is far from the truth. It is a combination of very many agro climatic parameters which determine qualities of a particular type of tea. Different cultivars allow different type of teas to be made.
We have undertaken this experiment at our small tea farm in India with our 32 years knowledge of tea cultivation and manufacturing. DOKE is the name of this plantation, which is situated in a non-traditional tea growing area of Bihar state in India. It is the tea maker who decides what will come out best from a particular tea bush. Let us hope for the best.
Response to question: Does tea plant produce a viable seed or fruit?
Answer: Yes. Camellia sinensis produces a tri-lobal seed pod (three seeds) in which each seed is approximately 1 cm in diameter. While it is possible to plant the seed and grow a tea plant, it will be a genetic mixture of the mother plant and the father plant. Genetic variation is controlled on most commercial tea plantations by using cutting or grafts from a single plant to create a field of “clones.”
Tea seeds can be single, bi-lobal or tri-lobal seed pods. So far they were considered a waste product and sometimes poisonous, but China has developed a oil extraction technology, which produces very high quality tea seed oil or camellia oil, which is being considered as good as olive oil for cooking medium.
Sorry, I am not trying to contradict you Susan, but only adding to your effort of educating the beginers in Tea.
Excellent point. I had seen first-hand single, bi and tri-lobal pods. However, when I looked for published references from several university botany departments, I could only find references to tri-lobal seed pods. Glad to have the clarification!