82 'IlIK TEA PLANT. 



and thus a "red lih" entered also into the arms of the 

 town of Florence. 



Man\- attempts have been made to grow Tea and 

 Coffee plants at La Mortola, but neither flourishes and 

 both eventualh' perish. The Tea plant can, in favourable 

 conditions, grow to a height of fifteen A'ards : it then 

 looks quite like a Camellia, and in fact belongs, as does 

 that plant, to the Ternstromiaceae. Indeed it is now 

 actualh' classed in the same genus with the Camellia as 

 C '. Thca. The name Camellia has an almost poetical 

 sound, perhaps because it reminds one of ''La Uame aux 

 Camelias". But its origin is prosaic enough. It is deri- 

 ved from Kamel the famih' name of a Jesuit father, 

 who brought the Camellia to Spain from Manilla more 

 than 150 ■sears ago. Linnaeus named the plant after 

 this same George Kamel, who also called himself Ca- 

 mclus, and gave it the specific name of '"japonica" as 

 it had originalh- reached Manilla from Japan. The 

 flowers of the Tea tree are ver\' like single Camellias 

 and both have the same profusion of stamens. As long 

 as it survives at La Mortola the Tea tree blossoms in 

 September. The tlowers, which are porcelain-white suf- 

 fused with pink, have not much perfume. The differ- 

 ence between the various sorts of tea are due to the 

 age of the leaves, their treatment, and the season at 

 which tliey are gathered. According to the Rev. B. C. 

 Henr}', Caiue/li'a Thca is still found wild in large c|uanti- 

 ties in the interior of the island of Hainon, in South China, 



The Arabian Coffee tree, Coffca arabica, is a small, 

 evergreen, pyramidal tree between five and six -s'ards 



