Gadenin日本語Get the appWhy the flat top exists
A tea plant is naturally a tree. Given its own way it grows a single dominant leader, reaches fifteen feet (4.5 m) or more, and carries its new flushes at the top where you cannot reach them. Every tea bush you have ever seen in a photograph is that tree cut repeatedly into a shape that suits picking, and the shape is deliberate down to its height.
The target is a bush kept at roughly waist height, around thirty to thirty six inches (75 to 90 cm), with a broad, dense, level top. That level surface is the picking table, and it does three separate jobs. It puts every new flush within easy reach without bending or stretching. It forces the plant to produce many shoots of the same age at the same time, so a flush arrives all at once and can be picked in one pass. And it keeps the plant out of the wind and easy to net or cover.
Getting there is a matter of cutting the plant lower than feels comfortable, several times, in its first years. Every cut removes the plant's leading shoot and makes it break into multiple side shoots below the cut, and repeating that at successively higher levels builds a dense branched framework instead of a single stem. Once that framework exists the annual work is very light.
This is the opposite of how ornamental camellias are pruned, where the aim is to preserve flowering wood. On a tea bush flowers are a distraction and you are cutting to force leaf, so hard and repeated cutting is correct.
| Cut | When | Height | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| First framing cut | First or second year, after establishment | Six to eight inches (15 to 20 cm) | Break the single leader, force low branching |
| Second framing cut | A year later | Twelve to sixteen inches (30 to 40 cm) | Multiply the framework branches |
| Third framing cut | A year later again | Twenty to twenty four inches (50 to 60 cm) | Fill out and level the future table |
| Annual light skiff | Every year once cropping | Just above the current table | Level the surface, remove spent shoots |
| Renewal prune | Every four or five years | Down into old wood | Restore vigor when flushes get thin |
Building the frame in the first years
Do not start cutting the year you plant. A newly planted tea bush needs a full season, and preferably two, to get its roots down before it can afford to lose its top. Cut a plant that is not established yet and it sulks, regrows weakly and loses more time than the pruning saves.
Once it is clearly growing away, make the first framing cut low, in the range of six to eight inches (15 to 20 cm) from the ground. This is the cut that people cannot bring themselves to make, and skipping it is the commonest reason home grown tea plants end up as leggy shrubs that are never really pickable. The plant responds by breaking three to six shoots from the remaining stem, and those shoots are the permanent structure of the bush.
Repeat the process a year later at roughly twice the height, cutting all the new shoots back, and again the year after. Each round doubles the number of branches, so a plant that had one stem has four after the first cut and perhaps twelve to twenty by the third. That density is what produces a flush you can pick in one go.
Make the cuts in late winter or very early spring, while the plant is still dormant and before the buds swell. Cut immediately above an outward facing bud or leaf joint, and take out anything dead or crossing at the same time. Feed and water well afterwards, because you are asking the plant to rebuild a canopy from stored reserves.
- Wait for establishment Leave a newly planted bush unpruned for at least one full growing season, until it is putting out vigorous new shoots of its own accord. Rub off flower buds in the meantime.
- Cut low and hard Take the whole plant down to six to eight inches (15 to 20 cm) in late winter, cutting cleanly above a bud. Expect it to look ruined for about six weeks and then break into multiple shoots.
- Cut again, higher The following late winter cut every shoot back to about twelve to sixteen inches (30 to 40 cm). Remove any shoot growing straight into the center of the bush.
- Level the table In the third round cut to twenty to twenty four inches (50 to 60 cm), this time keeping the cuts at a consistent height across the whole bush so the top is flat rather than domed.
- Let it rise to picking height After the last framing cut allow the bush to grow up to about waist height and then hold it there permanently by picking and by the annual skiff.
Picking is most of the pruning
Once the frame is built, the act of picking a bud and two leaves off every flush is itself a light pruning that happens repeatedly through the season. Each pick removes the growing tip of a shoot, which makes that shoot break two or more new shoots below the pick, which is precisely what you want. A bush picked regularly gets denser on its own and needs very little separate pruning work.
The annual maintenance cut, taken in late winter, is a light leveling of the top: shear or cut an inch or two (3 to 5 cm) off the whole surface to take out the stubby unpicked shoot ends and any dieback, and to bring the table back to one level. If the bush has crept upward over the season, take it back down to the height you want to pick at rather than letting it climb an inch a year until it is over your head.
Take out weak, dead and inward growing wood at the same time, and thin the interior if the bush has become so dense that no light reaches the middle. A tea bush wants to be dense on top and reasonably open inside, so that air moves through it and the frame branches stay healthy.
Never remove more than about a third of the canopy in a maintenance year. That budget is easy to blow through if you both shear the top hard and thin the interior, and a bush that loses too much at once will spend the first half of the season rebuilding leaf instead of giving you flushes.
Stop picking and stop cutting well before the first frosts. Both operations provoke soft new growth, and shoots that have not hardened before cold weather blacken and die back, which costs you the outer layer of the picking table going into spring.
Renewal, and what to record
After some years of regular picking the surface of the bush becomes congested with short knotty shoot ends, the flushes get shorter and the leaves smaller, and the intervals between flushes stretch out. This is normal and it is the signal for a renewal prune: cut the whole bush back into old wood, well below the picking table, in late winter, and let it rebuild.
Tea takes very hard pruning well and will break from thick old stems. A bush cut back to eighteen inches (45 cm) recovers fully, but expect to lose most of a season's picking while it does, so plan a renewal for a year when you have some tea in the jar. If you cannot accept a gap and have more than one plant, renew them in rotation, one each year.
The alternative on a plant that is only mildly congested is to cut about six inches (15 cm) below the picking table rather than into thick wood. This is a lighter operation, the bush is back in production the same season, and it is often enough for another three or four years.
Record the height you cut to and the date every time you prune, and put the following season's first flush date and picking intervals against it. Tea responds slowly enough that a single season proves nothing, but three or four years of heights against flush intervals shows plainly whether your bush is being held at the right level, and it will usually reveal that the bush is a little taller each year than you intended.