assamica against sinensis · leaves at one scale · six cultivars
Built as a memo rather than a table: the thing worth hanging it up for reads across the room, with the full reference in smaller type below it.
Three sizes in one archive — from a sheet on the fridge to a poster on the wall.
Each cultivar’s silhouette follows its variety rather than a measurement of one bush: leaf size also depends on altitude, age and pruning.
The tea plant does not pollinate itself: its own pollen germinates, but fertilisation fails. Tea seed therefore always has an outside father, and a seedling never repeats its mother bush. A plantation grown from seed is not a cultivar but a mixed population in which every row is slightly different.
That is why every named cultivar exists only as cuttings. Yabukita was picked out in Shizuoka in 1908 from a single seedling; today it accounts for about three quarters of Japan’s tea acreage — millions of plants genetically identical to that one bush. Longjing 43 was made the same way: selected from a single plant, then taken forward by cuttings.
The practical part follows. When a packet names a cultivar, you get the same genotype every time, and the difference between years is weather and hands. When it says "old bushes" or "seed-grown", the bushes differ from each other as well, and nobody is promising the same cup next year.
Why the numbers can be trusted. Every countable number here is computed from data rather than typed in, and the sheet must pass 7 independent checks before it is allowed to build — how many items there are, the order they come in, and the claim in the highlighted box itself. If one fails, there is no file.
