Voi;. XXXVIII. No 
Whole No. 1559, 
Price Five Cents, 
$2.00 Per Year. 
[Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1879, by the Rural Publishing Company, in the office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. — Entered at the PoHt-Ofiice at New York City N Y 
as seeond-clasB matter.] 
balls, in which condition fermentation soon 
sets in. Having fermented enough, the balls 
are broken open and dried in the sun ; and, 
finally, the drying process is completed by 
heating in a furnace. This is for black tea. 
The manufacture of green tea is somewhat 
different. In this case, the leaves are not 
withered and fermented, but repeatedly heated 
in pans, rolled and sun-dried. The difference 
between green and black tea lies wholly in the 
manufacture, not iu the plants. 
No conclusions can yet be drawn as to the 
practicability of manufacturing tea at home. 
Labor is too high iu this country to admit of 
tiie mode of manufacture now practised in 
China and other Asiatic countries. Much of 
the work which is there deemed necessary 
is done, however, with reference to an ocean 
voyage for the product, and could be dispensed 
with for home use. Much work is also ex¬ 
pended for the purpose of meeting existing 
commercial ideas of the appearance of 
the tea, without bettering the quality of 
it, and if such prejudices were overcome, 
the cost of production would be materi¬ 
ally reduced. No process of manufacture 
is yet known by which we, in this coun¬ 
try, can produce an article at a paying 
rate that can at all compete with foreign 
teas in the market. But we see no reason 
why these obstacles should not be over¬ 
come. The adoption of an industry so 
exclusively foreign must necessarily be 
gradual, and thu failures which the at¬ 
tempts of a few unskilled amateurs have 
resulted In, do not prove that success will 
never be reached. Much harm has been 
done to the enterprise by a class of jour¬ 
nals which are too ready to denounce 
new ideas and their promulgators. The 
home production of our tea is a proposi¬ 
tion so pregnant with interest as to jus¬ 
tify the most complete and thorough ex¬ 
periments, and to discourage such experi¬ 
ments tends to blight the development of 
fc the Industry. When by thorough trials 
K shall have been fouud to be a failure, 
then it is time to denounce the idea of 
producing tea at home. Mr. S. Ott gives 
the Bubal his experience in tea culture 
as follows;— 
“I have some twenty-odd plants that 
grow finely aud yield good tea, and are 
tine, flourishing, ornamental, evergreen 
shrubs. The largest bush is four feet nine 
inches high, and quite strong and bushy, 
i That the tea plant will flourish in this cli¬ 
mate is easily proved by examining these 
fine plants, which do so well with no 
special care, or enrichment of soil. I 
find no trouble in raising them from 
seed or plants, if one particular point is 
atteuded to; and that is, that while 
young, and for the first two or three 
years, they be shaded so that the heat of 
the sun will not reach the roots, as this 
kills them. They can be shaded by any¬ 
thing that keeps the roots cool. I lost quite 
a large number of plants until I learned 
that point. Then 1 mulched my plants 
with ‘pine straw '—leaves of the pine tree 
—some six or eight inches deep, aud this 
► protected them perfectly. The leaves of 
the plant are uot affected by the heat of 
the suu, or by freezing in the winter in 
this climate, where the thermometer 
marks down to IS*, aud even 15® some¬ 
times, though very seldom. 
“ The blossoms of last year are now just 
ripemngiuto tea-uuts or seed. My plants 
first blossomed in October and November 
of 1877, aud the buds, after bloomiug in 
December, wore frozen d uri ug some severe 
cold weather, and I thought, of course, 
thut ends thembut the following fall 
—November, 1878—1 fouud all were safe, 
aud I gathered several quarts of fine tea- 
nuts. So now the fruit of last year’s 
blooms—like the specimen sent—is just 
ripening and the nuts falliug, and at the 
same time the bushes are covered with 
blooms, which, I believe, is a rare thing 
in plants. 
"We have used the tea made from the 
young leaves in the spriug, aud our 
friends unite in its praise for its line, 
fresh flavor and extra quality of the 
Oolong variety. In the greeu or growing 
state, there is no flavor to the leaf; but 
killing the leaf with steam—cooking the 
juices iu the leaf—aud ;hen drying in a 
slow oven, bring out the tea flavor. Of 
course, we do not manipulate it so as to 
make it look like the imported Chinese 
THE TEA PLANT 
Thousands of our readers who, from child 
hood, have been accustomed to sip the 
fragrant extract we call tea, may know 
nothing of the nature of the plant which 
produces this article, aud, perhaps, they 
have never seen the leaves iu any other 
form than as the dried, curly material 
they purchase of their grocers, ready for 
the tea-pot. To such, the engraving of a 
branch, flowers and fruit of the Tea plant, 
which we here present, may be of inter¬ 
est. Botanieally, the Tea plant belongs 
to the family Camilliacea;, and the whole 
plantgreatly resembles the much-admired 
Camellia, so common in greenhouses. 
Like this, the leaves of the Tea plant are 
alternate, evergreen, of a shining dark- 
green, aud somewhat leathery, when full- 
grown. The flower, seen at a, is white, 
with a tiut of amber, fragrant and much 
smaller than the flower of the Camellia; 
the petals are thick and the stamens nu¬ 
merous. At b is seeu the ripe fruit, and 
at s, a single seed. Mr. S. Ott, of Aiken, 
South Carolina, who sent us the original 
from which this engraving w;'s made, 
states that the plants flower and mature 
seed freely in that latitude. 
Though Tea has been cultivated in 
China for upwards of 1,200 years, it is 
said to be fouud in its really wild state 
only iu Upper Assam, and that plants 
found growing wild iu China are fugitives 
from cultivation ; but this whole questiou 
of fugitive vegetation is oue on which 
many different opinions arc held by 
eminent botanists. The Assam Tea plant 
—Thea Assamiea—differs, however, from 
the Chinese—Thea viridia — in several 
particulars:—It grows quicker, does uot 
bear seed so readily, aud the leaves often 
measure nineiuehes iu length, when full- 
grown; the Chinese plant is also much 
hardier. 
The Tea plant was brought to this coun¬ 
try about IX) years ago. In 1858 the 
United States Government imported 10,- 
000 plants from China, with a view to try 
them iu this climate, and this number 
being soon trebled by propagation, they 
were distributed in many parts of the , 
Southern States. Prom the outbreak of l 
the late war, and during the whole period 
of this domestic trouble, but little atteu- v 
tion was paid to tea culture; but after l 
the war had closed, the interest was again \ 
revived, and the Department of Agricul¬ 
ture has since distributed a large number 
of plants each year. 
These numerous trials have established 
the fact that the plant can be grown iu 
this country, though, perhaps, uot so rap¬ 
idly as in Asia. It will withstand a light 
frost unharmed, and the temperature has 
even fallen to zero without causing it any 
material injury; but It succeeds best iu a 
hot, damp climate, with copious rainlalls 
W/TpSS 
o # ^ 
THE TEA PLANT.—Drawn from Life 
