From a Seed to a Leaf

For new tree, you need to plant a seed. Or more simply let nature take its course: the tree makes a fruit, the fruit falls or is eaten by an animal which transports it far away, and the seed germinates and gives rise to a new shrub, a new tree… With a few exceptions , it is the universal method of reproduction of fruit trees.

But what about the tea plant? It's a camellia with pretty white flowers and funny trilobed fruits. It even bears so much fruit that in certain regions of China it is made one of the most popular oils. However, few of these seeds will give a new tea plant ...

For centuries, when one wants to multiply a tea plant, one have made a cuttings: cut a young branch, let it make roots in water, then replant it and wait for a new clone of the first tea plant. Indeed in tea plants very few seeds germinate, which makes cuttings very interesting, but this is not a reason for making this cuttings systematic. The seeds could easily be harvested and allowed to germinate in order to get enough new plants to develop new gardens. And yet ...

There is a good reason not to let nature take its course: the purity of cultivars, the uniformity of tastes ... For a given tea, there are one or two cultivars used, for a family of teas, a well-codified series of cultivars. We are talking about cultivars, created by Man, and not varieties invented by Nature ...

There are even research centers dedicated to creating the cultivars of tomorrow, controlling hybridization over decades and carefully selecting just one or two individuals for taste, productivity or resistance. Then each new plant will be a cutting, a clone, and there will be no more room for the seeds ...

Can we even speak of a cultivar when almost all the production of a region, a country, is made up of cuttings from a single individual, like the Yabukita in Japan for example? It’s no longer a family, even a eugenist, it’s the Clone Army ...

But there are a few exceptions in the tea world, often on the fringes of the former Middle Kingdom:

• Puer and Heicha, made from wild trees from the tea forests of Yunnan, Hunan and Guangxi, as well as Thailand and Laos. Some of these tea tree forests have remained wild, others have long been organized as gardens, but until very recently propagation by seed (human or wild) took precedence over cuttings.

• Minbei oolongs and the great wealth of wonderful Wuyishan Rocks teas: The rich, yet tough nature of Wuyi Cliffs has created over a hundred varieties of teas. If today nature has been supplanted by the hand of man and most of the current gardens come from cuttings during the last half-century, and more recently from new cultivars, there are still some old hundred-year-old tea plants and some tea plants. mysterious that appeared spontaneously and of which nothing is known ... The magic of nature ...

• The Phoenix Mountains dancongs: in eastern Guangdong, there is a region where diversity and the hand of nature are favored. The best teas come from a single tea plant, becoming arborescent over the decades and centuries. The teas are classified there either according to their lineage or according to the taste they develop, with a range of around a hundred flavors used to describe them, ranging from floral to fruity or woody ...

Cultivars of the main types of tea offer very recognizable tastes, making it possible to distinguish the origin from the first sip. The quality and variability of tea are due to micro-variations in the terroir and to the mastery of the producer: a certain standardization that has existed for centuries, long before globalization.

Natural tea plants offer something different. Variability, a little thrill of the unknown. The nature and age of these tea plants also gave body and length to teas that cannot be found on cuttings which often run out after a few decades.

But at the sight of these trees, we understand that they are also much less interesting for the rapid development of a new garden: they take longer to become lush, tend to be arborescent and less easy to prune into a picking table. On the other hand, because of their richer genetic material, they have a better chance of surviving insect attacks during the first years. And so, sometimes manage to colonize in mountainous places the forests surrounding the tea gardens, recreating forests of tea trees, and not only in Yunnan.

However, these tea plants have not been shunned by small local producers. If they often cannot be used for their commercial ranks because of their too great originality, they can be used for their personal production: like our Wild Tai Ping Hou Kui...