Your cup of tea and the camellia in the garden are close cousins
Tea comes from the leaves of Camellia sinensis, a sibling of the showy garden camellias. In the 1840s those blooms were the luxury flower of Europe, and a Parisian courtesan famous for them inspired both a Dumas novel and Verdi's La Traviata. Then orchids stole the spotlight.
The genus holds more than 220 species of evergreen shrubs and small trees, almost all from southern China and Indochina, growing from sea level to 3,200 metres. Linnaeus named it in 1753 after Georg Joseph Kamel, a Jesuit botanist in the Philippines. Flowers range from white through pink to red, each with a dense tuft of yellow stamens; truly yellow blooms occur only in South China and Vietnam, and tea plants always flower white. Some research suggests colour tracks pollinator: red and yellow species attract sunbirds, while smaller white ones are bee-pollinated.
Beyond tea, camellias feed and groom millions. Seeds of C. oleifera and several relatives are pressed into tea seed oil, the chief kitchen oil across much of southern China and for hundreds of millions of cooks overall. In Japan, tsubaki oil from C. japonica has long been used on hair, and camellia oil also protects the blades of cutting tools. A fungus growing on camellia leaves yields a compound used to make emodepside, a drug against parasitic worms.
Europeans first saw camellias painted on Chinese wallpaper, often in porcelain pots. The first living plants to flower in England, one red and one white, bloomed in 1739 at Thorndon Hall in Essex, the garden of Lord Petre, and his gardener James Gordon later sold them commercially. The expanding tea trade brought new double varieties aboard East India Company ships from 1792, and Colonel John Stevens carried the plant to New Jersey in 1797. Samuel Curtis published the first monograph on the genus in 1819.
The formal, overlapping-petal blooms that made camellias fashionable eventually made them seem stiff, and hothouse orchids replaced them. After the First World War they returned as woodland shrubs for mild climates. More than 26,000 cultivars are now registered. Wild species fare worse: many are threatened, and Camellia amplexicaulis survives only in cultivation.
Source: Camellia
