The growth of tea
Genetic studies of today’s tea plants are providing clues to how the plant was first domesticated.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00395-4

Tea
Researchers are uncovering the biological secrets — and potential health benefits — of one of the world’s most consequential plants.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00394-5

The tea green leafhopper (Empoasca onukii) is an insect that eats tea plants, and the conventional response to an attack was to discard the affected leaves. But in the 1930s, farmers in Taiwan found that the surviving leaves yielded an excellent tea. When attacked by leafhoppers, tea plants respond by producing a chemical alarm signal that attracts jumping spiders, a natural predator of leafhoppers. “Those alarm signals just happen to be delicious,” says Scott. “They have a really nice honey, fruity aroma that ends up in the processed tea and really increases the quality.” This Eastern Beauty tea is fashionable at the moment, so farmers are exploring which varieties are most favourably transformed by their defence mechanism against this insect.

Mmm, delicious alarm signals :)

sarahs mum said:

The tea green leafhopper (Empoasca onukii) is an insect that eats tea plants, and the conventional response to an attack was to discard the affected leaves. But in the 1930s, farmers in Taiwan found that the surviving leaves yielded an excellent tea. When attacked by leafhoppers, tea plants respond by producing a chemical alarm signal that attracts jumping spiders, a natural predator of leafhoppers. “Those alarm signals just happen to be delicious,” says Scott. “They have a really nice honey, fruity aroma that ends up in the processed tea and really increases the quality.” This Eastern Beauty tea is fashionable at the moment, so farmers are exploring which varieties are most favourably transformed by their defence mechanism against this insect.

Nature is cool

‘The origins of tea are clouded by the fact that wild C. sinensis plants have never been identified unequivocally. Close cousins of C. sinensis grow wild in China and neighbouring countries today, but they clearly belong to different species. And where wild-growing C. sinensis has been found, most scientists think that such plants are feral ones descended from crops.

This situation is not particularly unusual. “It’s become a truism that the wild forms of most of our domesticated crops don’t exist — they can’t be found,” says Wendel. There are many reasons for this, he explains. The plant might have been rare and driven to extinction, for example. But why ever it was, this means that researchers do not know the point from which tea domestication proceeded. They have not seen the plant that was first exploited by humans, so they do not know which of the modern plant’s traits were introduced by people. Rather, they must try to infer this information from hints in the plant’s DNA and its biology.’

That was really interesting, thanks.

Kothos said:

That was really interesting, thanks.

Tea as we know it is by far not the only tisane we imbibe.