“botanically classified into one of three varieties”
Thank you Richard - that explains a lot! Your reply explains why my 4 look so different. Nurseries don’t make that distinction and an anal gardener like me needs to know ;). Thanks for the lead! Now I have more to google with 
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Thank you for the link to Camilla Forest Nursery. That opened up a whole world for me.
I’ve not meet one person in Maryland who knew this plant grows well here. Now I see that … 20-30 varieties are available! Thanks again!
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My two tea plants are in bloom now.
I made tea a couple of years ago. I tried bruising and allowing oxidation before drying. I don’t remember the outcome much. It must not have been very memorable.
I’d heard deer really like to eat them, but mine seem to be mostly left alone inside a cattle panel enclosed area.
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Are they cold hardy to your area? I hadn’t thought to grow tea plants, I grow lemon balm to make a tea from it. Loquat I’ll eventually try to make a tea from and several other things also. But I didn’t know tea was so hardy
Says theres a range from zone 7-9 depending on the variety, but most can handle down to around 25 F. Young leaves die to freezes, but overall the plant survives fine.
One of the only US tea gardens (plantations) is in Charleston, SC area, ~zone 9a.
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These tea seem more cold hardy than my loquat on quince right next to them. I think I have varieties chosen for cold. One Russian and I don’t remember the other, maybe from One Green World.
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Wow more cold hardy than loquat is wild to me, mine have never been damaged by any temps, I think 14 is the low they got. Maybe I’ll look into them, do they get super big?
The “Assam” and “Cambodian” types are less hardy than the Chinese. The “Assam” were trees in the wild while the other two were shrubs. All three are now landraces.
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mine are below 4 feet at over 10 years but I’ve been terribly stingy with nitrogen apparently.
Based on my emails, I think its from 2014 and these:
Guangzhou Tea
Sochi Russian Tea
I think I have Sochi at my old house too that’s been in the ground several years longer than that and probably had significant drought stress in the summer.
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It’s my understanding that you can make tea from fig leaves, raspberry leaves, mint, and New Jersey tea leaves without caffeine with varying flavor profiles.
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Sochi is an advanced city with winters tempered by the Black Sea. It is barely in Russia and historically was not. This article is fairly accurate:
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Thanks. Never heard of NJ tea leaves. I have a good friend bought me some black raspberry seeds but they’re duds. Also afraid to grow them because of SWD.
But the “Sochi” Tea cultivar was created IN a Russia Breeding Program.
I’ll agree that it was created there in Sochi. I have studied their publications. Based on genetic evidence, I’ve contested the results of this one:
There’s a good bit more history to it prior to the Russian Civil War of which the Sochi conflict was a part.
The region traded hands dozens of times over history as it was repeatedly settled and colonized by the Greeks, Persians, Romans, other Persians, Scythians, Venetians, Genovese, Georgians, Mongols, Ottomans, and various Circassian groups. The Russian Empire in turn conquered the region in the 1800s despite a long running insurgency and several conflicts with the Ottomans in a series of very bloody conflicts that resulted in the genocide and expulsion to Anatolia of many of the Circassian peoples, the Ubykh tribe in particular who were allied with the Turks (and supported by several Western powers; arms shipments from the British Empire to the Circassian insurgents were one of the causes of the related Crimean War, somewhat mirroring events in the modern day). Of the remaining Circassians in the region, the Abkhaz retained their presence south of Sochi in Abkhazia (currently a breakaway region of Georgia, the Georgians and Abkhaz have an unfortunate and long history of trying to genocide each other in that region) and the Adygea are mostly in the mountains overlooking Sochi in the Adygea Republic, a semi-autonomous Republic within the Russian Federation. During and after the wars, a wide diversity of peoples from the Russian Empire settled in and around Fort Alexandria in what would become the city of Sochi. Several decades later during the Russian Civil War the conflict you mentioned occurred. Certainly a crazy and often miserable history to the place, despite its beauty.
Anyway, perhaps it’s technically correct to say barely within Russia, in the sense that say Miami or Hawaii is barely within the US? It doesn’t strike me as a particularly meaningful qualification beyond the technical, geographic sense, much less so in a cultural or historical sense. I’m never fond of these kinds of discussions though, and they never end well, so I think I’ll leave it at that.
But yeah, they grow a fair amount of tea on the slopes of the mountains over there outside the city. Tea has always been a very popular drink in eastern Europe, so as soon as they could, farmers started growing it there. At lower elevations they also have some of the only citrus groves in Russia.
The tea trade historically was dominated by the British Empire on the sea routes, and by the Russian and Ottoman Empires on the overland routes, a large part of the reason tea drinking is still so common in each of those cultures. Partly in response to growing British dominance of the trade, in the 1800s the Russian Empire began establishing plantations in what is now Georgia and Azerbaijan (I don’t know if it is still common in Georgia, but the Azerbaijani tea is still quite common, typically marketed as Azerchai. If I remember correctly it is a unique black tea blend that contains a local variety of thyme). Later on, a Jewish man named Iudas Koshman, who was born in the Pale of Settlement in the Ukraine but who had moved to Georgia and worked in the tea plantations there, was the first to bring tea plants to the Sochi region right around 1900. Apparently, many of the plants he established, which had to be protected during the winter the first several years, are still growing in the plantation there. After the civil war, tea farmers, including Koshman, had a lot of success and the tea grown around Sochi became fairly common. A black tea, it was usually marketed, as it still is today, as Krasnodarsky chai. After WWII, a fair bit of breeding work was done by Soviet scientists, particularly for cold hardiness, and tea production also became a lot more mechanized. For over a hundred years, they held the record for the most northerly commercial tea plantations on earth–a record only recently broken by none other than the British with the Tregothnan Tea plantation in the far southeastern corner of Cornwall.
As an interesting cultural/culinary aside, the Adygea are actually somewhat well known in a lot of post-Soviet countries, as they make a particular kind of cheese called Adygeyski cheese over there or Circassian cheese in English, that’s fairly well-known, and they also (as well as the Abkhaz and the Georgians further south) make a spicy chili sauce, usually called Adjika, that was one of the very few hot pepper sauces commonly available in the Soviet Union. That, together with the carrot-based kimchi made by the Koreans whom Stalin had deported from Manchuria to various parts of the Soviet Union, are pretty much the only dishes with hot peppers that are common in the otherwise not spicy cuisine of most post-Soviet countries.
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As you point out, the Russian occupation there is historically recent. The citrus, tea, and a few of the other crops have been there for centuries. This is in contrast to the 2 millennia of Russian history in Novgorod.
Again, I’m really not fond of these kinds of discussions. For what it’s worth, they’ve been in Sochi since before we occupied and annexed Hawaii. What counts as historically recent or not seems to mostly be determined by whether or not one likes the people living in a given place rather than on anything objective–hence some rather off-putting arguments about places like the Holy Land or the northern parts of the former Mexican Empire.
Tea was brought to that region only around 1900, long after Circassia’s rather violent incorporation into the Russian Empire. With citrus I personally don’t know, I’m not aware of much historical documentation of citrus cultivation north of the Caucuses.
Regarding Novgorod, once you start getting that far back it’s probably more accurate to say Rus’ than Russian. Back in those days, most of the eastern Slavs all spoke dialects of the same language and were still hundreds of years away from differentiating along national lines. But this has nothing to do with tea so I don’t think I need to blabber on any more about it all. The stuff about the Adygea was relevant enough to my mind, but I think I’ll draw the line here.
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So it is one of the 4 Georgian selections listed under brach 2 you think? I find periodicals that reference it by name in one section and not in another a bit irksome.
Any thoughts about growing this plant inside for the winter?
Is anyone familiar with the tea growers near Asheville, NC?
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