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borgf15

Camellia sinensis

borgf15
9 years ago

Hi, I just bought this plant at the urban garden center. The gal told me they didn't have any Camellia sinensis as they don't do well here in HI, yet I found this plant labelled "green tea." It sure does look like Camellia sinensis. Looking for an expert out there who knows if this is in fact Camellia sinensis, or some other variation of that plant, and if so if it's edible like Camellia sinensis.

Comments (6)

  • gardengal48 (PNW Z8/9)
    9 years ago

    Sure looks like camellia sinensis to me. It may be helpful to know that you can make tea out of any Camellia species......they just do not have quite same taste nor the caffeine content. But they are perfectly safe to use.

  • steiconi
    9 years ago

    and there are commercial tea growers on the big island; it might just need some elevation to grow in hawaii.

  • davidrt28 (zone 7)
    9 years ago

    Yep, I thought I'd even read somewhere that there were once a few tea plantations on elevated parts of the Hawaiian islands but I could be wrong. In any case go high enough and you can definitely grow subtropicals that need slight seasonality and cool nights; this is why South African proteas are grown there for the cut flower market.

  • borgf15
    Original Author
    9 years ago

    Mahalo for the help! They were growing this at the urban garden center in Pearl City, so I guess it may be a variety which does well at lower altitude? I hope so since I live in Kapolei...

    Can anyone identify the exact variety?

  • hotzcatz
    9 years ago

    Well, camellia sinensus is green tea, so they even labelled it sort of correctly. It looks like a tea plant to me, but I can't tell you the variety since those all look too similar in my eyes.

    As far as it being "green" tea, the green and "black" tea all come from the same plant but are treated different to be the different teas.

    There's a few folks growing tea on the Big Island. One over near Volcano, one in Ahualoa and I just saw about a quarter acre of it in Waimea yesterday.

    There's a half dozen plants in my yard, but it's a pretty slow grower so I've not done much harvesting yet since they've only been there several years and were twig sized when they started.

  • borgf15
    Original Author
    9 years ago

    What's your elevation? Have you been doing anything special to keep the soil slightly acidic? Fertilizer?

    Mahalo!

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