Last night a got a call from Takahiro saying he had a few tea cuttings for me, from his own plants! This is really wonderful and unexpected. I quickly dashed over to pick them up, and he told me a little about the cultivar, Benikaori.

I had tried looking for any information about it online, but found none. The USDA Tea pamphlet says only “in Japan [..] used for black tea production”. That’s mysterious, as Japan does not drink black tea – why would they grow it? Takahiro explained that after WWII, when Japan was economically devastated and looking for things they could export, ‘Benikaori’ was developed as a cultivar that could be grown in Japan and made into good black tea for export. It’s still pretty mysterious how it ended up being grown in Hawai’i (which has a really different climate).

In any case, Takahiro gave me a bucket:
I managed to get 86 cuttings from that little bucket! He said that even cuttings from the totally green tips of the plant can sometimes root, so i extracted every bit of material i possibly could.