As a beverage with strong social, economic, cultural and medicinal importance it has played a significant role over the last 3000 years of human habitation, the earliest record being found in ancient Egypt.
In the modern world for 3 billion people in 160 countries tea in its various forms, black, green, white, yellow and oolong is the regular drink of choice.
It is taken and enjoyed for its aroma and pleasing taste which makes its inherent health benefits a bit of a bonus. It is rich in secondary metabolites, polyphenols, vitamins, minerals, theamine, volatile oils and caffeine.
For all of the history and global consumption of tea it is only very recently that a group of scientists in China have been able to sequence the genome, up until then being a bit of a mystery.
The genome of tea is 3 billion DNA base pairs in length which came as a surprise to the researchers in its complexity compared to, for example, that of coffee which has only a quarter of base pairs in comparison and considerably more than other plant species that have been sequenced.
There are about 100 species of plants in the Camelia genus although only the strain of Camelia Sinensis is sourced as the commercially grown variety. It is a very durable and adaptable plant mainly through, initially, natural selection and then intentional cross breeding and this explains how it has been able to become suited to diverse habitats on just about every continent with varying climate and soil types.
In 2014 tea production globally was 5.56 million metric tonnes and covered an equivalent landed area of 3.8 million hectares which can be visualised as being the same size as Switzerland, flattened out or not.
However, the diversity does introduce its own range of problems with vastly different productivity and quality worldwide. Other issues include for example the extensive use of man made fertilisers and natural sewage based treatments which although commonplace in some producing countries has resulted in a ban on imports by other nations with stricter legislation on chemicals.
The new revelations around the genome are hoped to lead to improvements in quality, perhaps towards some consistency and to arrest incidences of soil erosion and leaching of natural nutrients which threaten to endanger cultivation in those regions where the local population depend upon tea growing as their most important agricultural practice and means of income.
Tea plays such an important role in a great range of ecology's and is just too big a crop to be allowed to falter and fail.
The future of tea is however a matter of optimism which will be of major reassurance to tea drinkers across the globe, me included.
Now, I just have to put on a brew and find a handful of biscuits to dunk in it.
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