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Cultivar

Fushun

富春　ふうしゅん　Fushun

富春 — tomi/fu (富, wealth, abundance) plus shun (春, spring). NARO's handbook glosses it directly: the name was chosen for the full, satisfying flavour of early spring, and carries the wish that the cultivar's heavy yields would enrich the tea industry (茶業を豊に富ませる品種になるように).

A 1965 Kanaya cross of the breeding line Z1 against Kanayamidori, registered in 1991 as Cha Norin No. 41, Fushun yields a third to a half more than Yabukita and was named for the hope it would make tea farming pay — and it matters here chiefly as the seed parent of Seimei, the cultivar that reaches Yabukita by two different routes.

Lineage of Fushun, drawn: 4 cultivars and 3 parents with no record here. Each cultivar is a link to its own page.Fushun1991Kanayamidori1970Seimei2020Yabukita1953Z1S6Shizuoka zairai

Lineage of Fushun

Fushun is a high-yielding sencha cultivar from the national station at Kanaya, registered in 1991 as 茶農林41号. Its selling point is volume: NARO’s handbook puts it thirty to fifty per cent above Yabukita across both the first and second flush, and rates it particularly well on the cool ground and poor soils where Yabukita underperforms. The name says as much — 富春, an abundant spring, chosen with the stated wish that the cultivar would enrich the tea business.

Its more interesting role in this collection is as a parent.

Lineage

  • Z1 ♀ — a numbered breeding accession held at Kanaya, never released as a cultivar.
  • Kanayamidori ♂ (かなやみどり) — Cha Norin No. 30, itself a cross of the landrace selection S6 with Yabukita.

Forward, Fushun is the seed parent of Seimei, crossed with Saemidori. That matters for the shape of the pedigree rather than for either cultivar’s cup: Saemidori is Yabukita × Asatsuyu, and Fushun reaches Yabukita through Kanayamidori, so Seimei descends from Yabukita along two independent paths. It is the clearest case in this collection of why a pedigree has to be drawn as a graph — a tree layout would have to either duplicate Yabukita or drop one of the two routes, and the fact that the two routes exist is the whole point.

History

The cross was made at Kanaya in 1965 and carried the trial designation F1-NN-71, renamed 金谷12号 in 1983 for the regional adaptability trials that ran from 1984 to 1990 across several prefectures. MAFF registered it as 茶農林41号 in 1991; a separate Plant Variety Protection Act registration, No. 3697, followed in October 1993. As with Fukumidori and Hokumei, sources quoting one date or the other are describing two different registrations of the same plant.

Characteristics

The bush is upright (直立型) with vigour above Yabukita’s, which is enough of a habit that NARO advises pruning young plants low to force branching. Plucking runs one to three days after Yabukita — slightly late rather than genuinely late, and well short of the five- to six-day figure recorded at the breeding site itself (see conflicts).

Disease resistance is mixed and worth reading carefully, because the breeder’s own two accounts of it disagree. Ring spot and bacterial shoot blight are medium or better; anthracnose and mulberry scale are rated weak, and NARO’s cultivation notes say plainly that both need a spray programme where they are established. The claim that Fushun surpasses Yabukita on anthracnose does come from the breeder — the 1992 release paper scores it 1.2 against Yabukita’s 1.7 — but the handbook’s later rating is the one this record follows.

Lineage

Bred from this

Notable descendants

  • Seimei (せいめい) — seed parent, crossed with Saemidori
  • 野茶研01号 — seed parent, crossed with Asanoka

A controlled cross at Kanaya, Z1 against Kanayamidori, and the point at which several lines in this collection meet. Through Kanayamidori it descends from Yabukita and the S6 landrace selection; forward, it is the seed parent of Seimei, whose pollen parent Saemidori is itself a Yabukita cross — so Seimei reaches Yabukita by two separate paths, which is precisely the shape a pedigree drawn as a tree cannot show.

Where the sources disagree

  • Budding season and disease resistance: Tea Nursery describes Fushun as late-budding, about 5 days after Yabukita, with high resistance to anthracnose, ring blight and mochi disease 'surpassing' both Yabukita and Kanayamidori. Both figures trace back to the breeder rather than to nothing. The 1992 release paper puts plucking at the breeding site about 6 days after Yabukita, and rates anthracnose resistance 中庸 with a disease index of 1.2 against Yabukita's 1.7 — better than Yabukita, but level with Kanayamidori's 1.1 rather than surpassing it. The same paper gives the regional-trial average as only 1.5 days after Yabukita, which is what NARO's later handbook states as 1 to 3 days, and the handbook rates anthracnose flatly weak (弱). This record follows the handbook on both, but the disagreement is between two of the breeding institution's own publications, not between the breeder and a retailer.
  • Cross year: 1965 is confirmed both by the release paper and by the pedigree table in NARO's handbook. Tea Nursery's 27-year development period is one year long; the paper counts 26 years from cross to registration.

Sources

  1. 附表１ 茶農林登録品種一覧 (MAFF registered tea cultivar list — 茶農林41号 row)
  2. 茶品種ハンドブック 第6版 Version 2 (NARO Tea Cultivar Handbook — ふうしゅん entry)
  3. 茶44品種・系統のDNA品種識別技術 (NARO SSR cultivar identification manual, 2021 — pedigree table)
  4. 煎茶用新品種‘ふうしゅん’の育成 (Yamaguchi et al., 野菜・茶業試験場研究報告 B 茶業 5: 1–13, 1992 — release paper)
  5. Fushun ふうしゅん — Tea Nursery