Speaking spring season in Japan, many people would recall cherry blossoms. Yes that’s right, however, not only cherry blossoms, buds of tea plants are also symbol of spring in Japan!!

Buds of tea plants began to grow as it became wormer.

Based on the article[087], the state of bud depicted in the following is called as “sprouting”.

In the dormant term, tea bud is enveloped by two bract. As it get wormer, tea bud starts to grow and extend its length. When the length of tea bud becomes twice of bract, we call the state as “sprouting”. And then, the day when the sprouting rate becomes more than 70% is called as “sprouting time”.

Sprouting rate of tea buds in the first photo seems to be 60%. The photo was taken on 22th March for the purpose of pre-survey, so sprouting time has already come!? The cultivar of tea plants in the photo is one of the early budding cultivars “Yamanoibuki”.

We can see the difference in sprouting rate among cultivars as shown in the below.

In addition to the tea bushes getting more green with sprouting, multihued colors of spring everywhere! Around tea plantations!!

In Japan, the time of bloom of cherry blossom is considered to be one of the indicators of tea shoot growth. Roughly speaking, in the year cherry blossoms bloom earlier, tea buds sprouting earlier.
This relation implies that tea is symbolic for spring in Japan.

I hope tea farmers will success to produce the finest teas in this year too and people will enjoy the finest teas from Makinohara worldwide!!
And hopefully teas in Makinohara would win the best award in Japan same as the last year.

Reference
[087] The Annual Tea Conference of NIVOT (1997) : Terminology used in the Tea Research, Tea Research Journal 85:27-70.