Ujimidori

Ujimidori is one of the late additions to the Uji cultivar group — selected by the Kyoto Prefectural Tea Research Institute in 1983, three decades after the 1954 batch that produced Asahi, Samidori, Gokou and Ujihikari, and out of the same kind of material: an individual plant picked from Uji’s seed-grown zairai stock rather than bred by crossing. It was never registered, nationally or under the Plant Variety Protection Act, and it is still commonly referred to by the strain number it was given, 京研307号. It is, however, one of Kyoto Prefecture’s twelve recommended cultivars (茶奨励品種) and one of the ten the prefecture groups as 宇治種 and has been subsidising growers to replant since 2021.

Lineage

• Uji zairai ♀ — a landrace seedling. As with every zairai selection in this collection, the pollen parent was never recorded and could not have been.

That puts it in the same category as Samidori and Asahi, and distinguishes it sharply from the Institute’s other modern work: Houshun and Tenmyo, registered in 2006, are open-pollinated seedlings of Samidori, one generation further from the landrace. Ujimidori goes back to the zairai stand directly.

History

The Institute recorded it as developed in 1983 under the designation Kyoken No. 307 — the same numbering series that produced Kyoken 283, also in this collection. Neither was carried through to formal registration.

The one piece of applied research that surfaces for it is a blending trial: Ujimidori blended with Yabukita at a 60:40 ratio is reported to have given the best results two years running, in 2009 and 2010. That is a fair indication of how it is actually used — as a quality component in a blend rather than as a single-cultivar tea — and of why it has stayed rare. A cultivar valued for what it contributes to a blend does not need a large planted area to matter.

Characteristics

The season is medium-early — 中早生, two days ahead of Yabukita — and sits in the middle of the Uji group: later than Houshun, which is extremely early, and earlier than Samidori and Gokou. The bush is of intermediate habit with vigorous early growth, and the shoots are medium-sized with a good green colour.

It is grown for gyokuro, and the qualities credited to it are the ones the Uji cultivars are generally selected for — a refreshing cultivar aroma, and colour and inner quality the prefecture rates 優秀. The prefecture’s characteristics table also gives it the two disease ratings it has: slightly strong against anthracnose and strong against gray blight, both better than Yabukita’s, though it advises against planting it in the cold parts of Kyoto. What is missing is a measured yield: no kg/10a trial survives, only the table’s qualitative 中, and the one hundred-bud weight in print looks like an error (see conflicts). For an unregistered cultivar planted in one prefecture and used mainly in blends, that is an unsurprising gap rather than a search failure.