“Camellia” was, strangely enough, named after a man who probably never heard of the plant. An Austrian Jesuit missionary to the Philippines, Georg Josef Kamel did provide the world with valuable information on the flora that grew there. But the “goddess” of flowers was not among them.
According to Alice Coats’ Plant Hunters, Cleyer “organized a lively smuggling trade for which he was eventually expelled.” That trade reportedly cost the Japanese he had suborned into helping him their lives.
So when Linnaeus was handing out plant names, he may have had his reasons for preferring to honor Kamel, a priest who handed out free medicines to the poor. Besides, you have to admit that camellia sounds much better than cleyerria would have!
Shortly thereafter, in 1698, a Scottish surgeon named James Cuninghame made a perilous trip to China in the employ of the East India Company. Between surviving massacres and imprisonment, he somehow managed to ship about 600 varieties of Oriental plants—including camellias--back to England. Although he never made it home himself to receive credit for that feat, European nurserymen apparently seized upon his finds with gusto. When another Scottish botanist, James Main, visited China in 1794, he purchased very few camellias because he thought those already being developed in Britain were superior.
Tea soon became nearly as essential there as it was in the Orient. The high demand for it may have motivated British colonization. And, in the late 1800's, tea saved the plantations of Ceylon from financial disaster after an epidemic of coffee rust.
The top three leaves of each camellia thea shoot are harvested, dried, and called, respectively, the flowering orange pekoe, the orange pekoe, and the pekoe. For black tea, those leaves are also crushed and oxidized.
A 1773 tax on the tea that was shipped to America made the beverage temporarily unpopular here. Certain disgruntled colonists expressed their displeasure by dressing like Indians, hacking open crates of imported tealeaves, and tossing them into Boston Harbor. (That must have been the largest “pot” ever brewed!) Perhaps the Boston “party” explains why coffee still seems to have the upper hand in the U. S.
