Camellia sinensis

This is the tea plant. Not "a tea plant" — the tea plant. Every cup of green tea, black tea, white tea, oolong, and pu-erh on Earth comes from a single species: Camellia sinensis. The differences in flavor and color come from the timing of the harvest and the way the leaves are processed afterward — green tea is the youngest leaves, briefly steamed; white tea is the unopened buds; black tea is fully oxidized older leaves; oolong is partial oxidation. Same plant, different fates.

It has been cultivated in China for at least three thousand years. The native range is debated — somewhere in the borderlands where southwestern China meets Myanmar, northeast India, and the eastern Himalayas — but the species has been moved by humans for so long that a clean point of origin is essentially impossible to recover. Tea cultivation began as Buddhist monastic practice, became court refinement, and is now the most-consumed beverage in the world after water. Camellia is named for Georg Joseph Kamel, a seventeenth-century Moravian Jesuit who worked as a pharmacist and naturalist in the Philippines and wrote extensively about Asian plants — though he never actually saw a tea plant himself. Linnaeus named the genus in his honor anyway.

What customers familiar with the showy japonica and sasanqua camellias don't always realize: Camellia sinensis is a beautiful ornamental in its own right. The leaves are smaller, narrower, and more refined than the glossy paddles of the ornamental species — fine-toothed, deep green, with a particular willow-like texture. Small fragrant white flowers with a generous boss of yellow stamens open in late fall through early winter, often partially tucked under the foliage like a quiet detail. The plant takes well to hedging, shaping, foundation use, container growing, or simply being left alone to grow into a four-to-eight-foot rounded shrub. It is hardier than the ornamental camellias — the small-leaved Camellia sinensis var. sinensis (the form Woodlanders grows) is reliably hardy through zone 7 and has been pushed into zone 6b with some shelter.

For southerners, this plant carries an unexpected regional weight: South Carolina is home to the only commercial tea plantation in the continental United States — the Charleston Tea Garden on Wadmalaw Island, less than two hours from Aiken — which has been growing Camellia sinensis for tea since the 1960s. Plant a few in your garden and you join a small, very specific, very Lowcountry tradition. A mature plant, properly maintained, will produce tea for a hundred years.

For the gardener who wants their ornamental to do something useful, the camellia collector ready to add the species that started it all, or anyone who has ever wanted to walk out the back door, snip a handful of new leaves, and brew their own pot.