The plant matcha comes from

What plant does matcha come from? The short answer

Matcha comes from Camellia sinensis, the tea plant. It is a broadleaf evergreen shrub that, left alone, grows into a small tree; tea growers keep it as a waist-high hedge and harvest the new shoots from the top. The leaf becomes matcha through what is done to the plant — shading, a single spring picking, steaming, flat drying and grinding — not through belonging to a different species. But within the species, the cultivar chosen for shade decides much of the taste, and a tin that names one is telling you more than any grade word.

The species

Tea is one species, Camellia sinensis, in the same genus as the ornamental camellias of gardens. It is native to the hill country where southwest China, northeast India and northern Burma meet, and it has been cultivated for at least two thousand years. Left to itself it grows into a small tree with glossy, serrated, oval leaves and small white autumn flowers with yellow stamens; in cultivation it is pruned into a dense hedge about waist high and prevented from flowering so its energy goes into leaf.

Two main varieties are recognized. Camellia sinensis var. sinensis, the small-leaf variety, is the tea of China and Japan: hardier, smaller-leaved, suited to cooler climates and to green tea. Camellia sinensis var. assamica, the large-leaf variety of Assam and Yunnan, is the tea of most black tea and pu-erh. Every Japanese tea — sencha, gyokuro, tencha — is the small-leaf variety, and the plant that becomes matcha is, botanically, the same plant that becomes a supermarket green tea bag.

The hedge

Japanese tea is grown in rows of tightly pruned hedges, on hillsides in Kyoto and Shizuoka and on flat, open fields in Kagoshima. The hedge form matters for matcha in two ways. It presents a flat table of young shoots that can be picked evenly — by hand for the top grades, taking the tender upper leaves, and by riding or straddle machines for most tencha — and it makes shading practical, because a row can be covered with cloth stretched on frames or, in the oldest Uji fields, with a canopy of reeds and rice straw built above the plants each spring.

A tea plant is pruned each year after harvest to keep the table level and the shoots young, and every few years more severely to renew it. Fields in Uji have been in production for generations; the plant is long-lived, and the age of a field is itself a disclosure some growers make.

The cultivar

Within the species, growers plant named cultivars propagated from cuttings, so that every plant in a row is genetically identical and behaves the same under shade. For tencha the choice is decisive, because the response to cover — how the leaf colors, how much theanine it keeps, how its aroma develops — differs by cultivar.

Yabukita is the cultivar behind about three-quarters of all Japanese tea. Selected by Sugiyama Hikosaburo in Shizuoka in 1908 and registered in 1953, it is hardy, productive and reliable for sencha, and it is a poor fit for shade: its covered leaf turns yellowish and the powder’s color suffers. Kyoto growers still use it for about half their tencha acreage, but the district’s reputation rests on cultivars chosen for shading.

Asahi, selected by the Uji grower Hirano Jinnojo, trades at the highest prices as tencha, is notoriously hard to grow, has a short window for picking, and is the koicha cultivar — deep umami, thick body, the leaf a house reaches for at the top of its range.

Samidori, selected by the third head of Yamamasa Koyamaen, is the most planted cultivar for hand-picked tencha: upright, balanced, sweet, the classic Uji usucha. It is also the parent of newer selections.

Gokou, from Kyoto’s prefectural tea research station and developed in 1954 from Uji native stock, carries strong umami and a distinctive aroma; it is used for competition gyokuro and holds up in milk.

Ujihikari came from the native stock of the Nakamura Tokichi tea house and was selected by the prefectural station; it is one of the three cultivars — with Asahi and Samidori — that Kyoto names as its principal hand-picked tencha cultivars.

Okumidori, a cross between Yabukita and a Shizuoka native, carries the most chlorophyll, colors well under shade, and accounts for about a fifth of Kyoto’s tencha acreage; it is favored where color matters and for processing.

Saemidori, bred at Makurazaki in Kagoshima, is the cultivar of Kagoshima’s large tencha fields: early, vivid green, high in amino acids under shade.

Tenmyo, registered by Kyoto’s research station in 2006 from a Samidori seedling, was bred for machine-harvested tencha — the same quality as its parent, the station says, from fields that are not picked by hand. It is the newest answer to the question of how a small prefecture keeps up with demand.

Almost every commercial matcha is a blend of several cultivars, adjusted each year so that a named blend tastes the same. Single-cultivar matcha is a recent niche, and it tastes of its plant and its year rather than of a house style. A tin that names its cultivar is telling you more about the taste than any grade word could.

The shade

For the three to four weeks before the spring harvest the rows are covered. Modern fields use black shade cloth at roughly 85%; the oldest fields in Uji still use honzu canopies of reeds and rice straw. Kyoto’s research station gives the timing as about ten to fifteen days for lightly shaded teas and twenty days or more for gyokuro and tencha, starting when the shoots have opened two and a half to three leaves. Under the cover the plant stops converting L-theanine to catechins, produces more chlorophyll, and develops the marine aroma that shaded teas carry — the changes that give matcha its sweetness, its color and its depth. Caffeine rises somewhat under shade too. Recent soil analysis in Uji suggests the practice began in the early fifteenth century, earlier than the Portuguese missionary accounts that were long the first record of it.

Shading is a stress. It cuts yield, weakens the plant, and requires frames, cloth and labor. A field cannot be shaded year after year without care, which is one reason the best tencha comes from growers who have done it for generations and from cultivars selected to tolerate it.

The year in the field

Winter. The plant rests. Growers prune, fertilize and, in Kyoto, build or repair the frames. Bamboo for whisks is cut in the same season, in Nara.

Early spring. The buds swell. Frost is the danger; fields in the Kyoto hills run fans to keep cold air moving.

April. When the shoots have opened two or three leaves, the covers go on — cloth on frames, or the reed canopies of the old fields — for twenty days or more.

Late April to May. The first harvest, ichibancha. Hand-picking for the top grades, machines for the rest. The leaf is steamed within hours and dried flat into tencha. This is the month that becomes the year’s drinking matcha.

June to August. Second and third harvests, coarser and richer in catechins, for cooking and latte grades. The plant is pruned back.

Autumn. The plant would flower if allowed; growers prune to prevent it. Tencha from May rests in cold storage; the traditional calendar opened the year’s jar in November.

Five years earlier. A newly planted field yields nothing usable for about five years, which is the other reason supply cannot follow demand quickly.

Where the plant grows now

Kyoto has the reputation and the cultivars; Kagoshima has the volume. Since 2020 Kagoshima Prefecture has produced more tencha than Kyoto, and its output roughly tripled between 2018 and 2023 while Shizuoka’s stayed flat; in 2024 it became Japan’s largest producer of crude tea overall. Its fields are large, flat and mechanized, its climate gives an early first harvest, and its organic acreage is the largest in Japan. Shizuoka, the sencha capital, is converting fields to tencha. Nishio, in Aichi, is a flat single district said to produce about 30% of Japan’s matcha. Yame, in Fukuoka, grows gyokuro and a little tencha. The plant is the same in all of them; the cultivar, the shading and the hand differ.

After the field

The leaf is steamed within hours to stop oxidation, dried flat without rolling into tencha, stripped of stems and veins, and ground — on granite mills at a few tens of grams an hour for the finest powders. None of that changes the species. It changes the leaf from a plant into matcha, and what arrives in the bowl carries everything the plant made: about 64 mg of caffeine per 2 g, 20–45 mg of L-theanine, about 200 mg of catechins.

Growing it yourself

A tea plant will grow in a mild, humid climate on acidic, well-drained soil — the conditions of the Pacific Northwest, the southeastern United States, or a large pot in a sheltered spot — and a nursery plant labeled Camellia sinensis is the right species. It will take a few years to establish, it will flower in autumn if you let it, and its new spring shoots, plucked and steamed and dried, will make a green tea. Making matcha from it is another matter: three weeks of shading a single bush, steaming the leaf within the hour, drying it flat, picking out every stem, and grinding it to a few microns. People do it, and the result is instructive, and the tin from Uji will taste better. The plant is only the beginning.

How a cultivar is made

A tea cultivar is a single plant, found or bred, that proved good enough to copy. Tea grown from seed varies — every seedling is a genetic individual — so for most of history Japanese fields were “native,” a mix of seedlings, and the tea was whatever the mix gave. Cultivar breeding began when growers started walking their native fields looking for the one bush that shaded better, colored better or tasted sweeter than its neighbors, taking cuttings from it, and planting a row of its clones. Hirano Jinnojo did this in Uji in the 1930s and gave the district Asahi; Yamamasa Koyamaen’s third head gave it Samidori; the Nakamura Tokichi house’s native stock gave the raw material for Ujihikari. Kyoto’s prefectural tea research station has run systematic selection since 1939, and the national research organization has bred cultivars for the whole country since the Yabukita era.

The process is slow. A promising seedling or a deliberate cross is planted out, watched for years, compared against Yabukita as the standard for earliness, yield, cold hardiness, disease resistance and quality, propagated, tested in other prefectures, and finally registered — typically twenty to thirty years after the first cutting. Tenmyo, registered in 2006, began as a Samidori seedling selected in 1977. Once registered, a cultivar is propagated by cuttings only, so that every Samidori bush in Japan is the same plant. That is why the name on a tin means something: it is not a style but a specific organism, with a known response to shade.

Reading the cultivar on a tin

Sources: Kyoto Prefecture tea research station cultivar pages; NARO cultivar handbook; Kyoto tencha acreage per a Uji merchant's published composition figures.

The plant under stress

Tea is a hardy shrub, and tencha asks it to do the hardest thing a tea plant is asked to do. Shading starves it of light at the moment it is growing fastest. Frost in April, when the buds have swollen and the covers are about to go on, can take a harvest; fields in the Kyoto hills run tall fans to keep cold air from settling on the rows. The dense, humid dark under a canopy invites the pests and fungal diseases that the open field discourages, which is why organic tencha is hard to grow and why most of it comes from Kagoshima’s drier, more open fields rather than Uji’s old, dense hedges. A field shaded every year without rest declines, and growers rotate or lighten the cover to let plants recover. None of this is visible in the bowl except as price and as the years of experience behind a grower’s name.

What the plant decides, and what it does not

It is worth being precise about how much of the bowl is the plant. The cultivar decides how the leaf responds to shade — color, sweetness, aroma — and it is fixed at planting. The field decides soil, slope, mist and age, and it is fixed for decades. The season decides the harvest and the weather. Then the hand takes over: how long and how well the field is shaded, whether the shoots are picked by hand or machine, how quickly the leaf is steamed, how it is dried and sorted, how it is blended and milled. Two tins of the same cultivar from neighboring fields can differ more than two cultivars from the same grower. The plant sets the possibilities; the process chooses among them. That is why the five disclosures worth reading — harvest, region, cultivar, use, grower — include the plant but do not stop at it.

The plant’s arrival in Japan

Tea seeds came to Japan more than once, but the plant that became matcha arrived with the monk Eisai, who returned from Song China in 1191 with seeds and with the Chinese practice of whipping powdered tea into hot water. By tradition he gave seeds to the monk Myoe, who planted them at Toganoo in the hills northwest of Kyoto and then at Uji, where the plant found the mist, the drainage and the proximity to power that made it the tea of the shoguns. The shading that turned the leaf into tencha was a Japanese invention layered onto the Chinese plant, by the early fifteenth century on the soil evidence. China itself abandoned powdered tea after a 1391 decree banned the compressed cakes it was made from; the species stayed the same on both sides of the sea, and the drink diverged. Every cultivar in the table above descends from those medieval plantings and from later Chinese and native stock, selected over centuries for a use that only Japan kept.

Numbers at a glance

• Species: Camellia sinensis; Japanese tea is var. sinensis, the small-leaf variety.
• Yabukita: about 75% of Japanese tea; registered 1953; about half of Kyoto’s tencha acreage despite yellowing under shade.
• Kyoto’s principal hand-picked tencha cultivars: Asahi, Samidori, Ujihikari; Okumidori about 19% of acreage.
• Gokou: developed 1954, Kyoto research station. Tenmyo: registered 2006, for machine-harvested tencha.
• Shade: about 85% cloth; 20 days or more for tencha; honzu canopies for the top grades.
• Harvest: first flush, late April to May; a new field yields in about five years.
• Volume: Kagoshima first in tencha since 2020; output roughly tripled 2018–2023.
• Per 2 g bowl: about 64 mg caffeine, 20–45 mg L-theanine, about 200 mg catechins.