Tea plant

It's a camellia.

Camellia sinensis, yes, which is a family of the japonica, which is the camellia flowers, which people commonly see in the garden, the pink and the red.

Yeah.

Big camellia flowers.

So it's the same family.

And there's two main varietals, the camellia sinensis, variety sinensis, which is grown in China.

and is into Nepal, and it's a much thinner, smaller leaf.

And then you get the Assamica, Camellia sinensis variety, Assamica, which is Kenya, India, Africa.

So what is tea and what is not tea, Gem?

So tea, true tea, are the leaves from the bush of Camellia sinensis.

Okay.

And we touched on that in the last episode with the China, India, indigenous plants.

Again, a similarity to coffee, Robusta Arabica,

Arabica.

And these are camellia sinensis variety sinensis and camellia sinensis variety asanica.

There are since then many sub-varieties of phobians which have been, you know, plant breeders have got into over the years.

I work for Universal Commodities, who are a large importer of tea, only tea.

And by tea, we're talking about Camellia sinensis, the true tea, not botanicals.

And I have been in New York some 26 years.

Prior to that, I worked for Lipton, previously owned by Unilever, now an independent company owned by CDT Capital.

And there are lots of other reasons why that's difficult.

It's not only expertise, it's also what bushes are growing in the ground, which takes us back to your original question, what is tea and why are we where we are? So tea, like coffee, is an ancient beverage, grew wild, not in Ethiopia, but in the southwest Chinese provinces, into Burma and across into Assam.

And this is Camellia sinensis growing wild in these regions.

Lots of myths and legends about how it became to be a beverage.

The ovary is three-celled with one seed in each cell, which is about the size of a cherry seed.

The tea plant is no doubt a native of India, Upper Assam, from whence it was early introduced into China, where it is now cultivated on an immense scale.

It is, however, also extensively cultivated in various parts of India, in Japan, Java, Australia, Sicily, Korea, and other tropical and subtropical countries and islands.

It is also cultivated to some extent in the southern United States, as in Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, and California, but apparently without any great success.

What plant?

It's called Camellia sinensis, and it's a shrub, basically.

[chuckles] Okay.

A perennial, and it grows in probably one thousand to seven thousand above sea level.