Houshun

Almost every cultivar bred in the last fifty years exists to push a picking season later — the おく- prefixed ones say so in their names. Houshun goes the other way. It is 極早生, extremely early: budding and plucking run seven days ahead of Samidori and ten days ahead of Yabukita, which makes it the earliest thing in the Uji districts and a way of opening the shaded-tea season rather than stretching its tail.

Lineage

• Samidori ♀ (さみどり) — the recorded seed parent, by open pollination. No pollen parent was ever identified, and in an open-pollinated seed lot none could be.

The Kyoto Prefectural Tea Research Institute collected natural-cross seed from Samidori bushes at Uji in 1975 and from 1977 selected two lines from the seedlings: strain 53-7, which became Houshun, and strain 53-38, which became Tenmyo. Both were registered on 14 December 2006, more than fifty years after Samidori’s own promotion. They share a mother and possibly a father — nobody knows — so they are half-siblings at minimum.

That makes Houshun a third-generation Uji landrace selection: Uji zairai to Samidori to Houshun, with the pollen side unrecorded at both steps.

History

Samidori was designated a Kyoto recommended cultivar in 1954. Twenty-one years later the Research Institute collected its seed, selection began two years after that, and thirty-one years from the seed the two selections were registered. It is a long programme by any standard, and a slow one by the standards of the national stations, whose crosses of the same era took twenty years rather than thirty.

The pairing of the two releases is deliberate and complementary. Houshun is the extremely early gyokuro cultivar; Tenmyo is a mid-season cultivar bred for machine-harvested tencha. One prefecture, one mother plant, two ends of the problem.

Characteristics

The season is the cultivar. Ten days ahead of Yabukita and a week ahead of its own mother is a large gap, and it is what a Uji grower is buying.

Yield is equal to Samidori’s and high, with a structure the Institute describes as 芽数型 — the crop comes from many buds rather than heavy ones, which suits hand-picking and the fine plucking that gyokuro takes. The bush is vigorous with a large spread (樹勢が強く株張りが大きい).

In the cup the Institute credits it with strong aroma and a notable freshness — 香気が強く、新鮮み がある — which is the pairing an early cultivar is usually selected for, since aroma is what the first shoots of the season have most of.

On disease the registration filing rates it strong against gray blight (輪斑病抵抗性は強) — one of the traits it is distinguished from both Yabukita and Samidori by — and the prefecture’s characteristics table puts it at medium against anthracnose. No release paper was located, which is the main gap in this record.