Clones and Cultivars
Every named plant in an Assam garden carries a code, TV1, TS 397, TTRI 2, or a garden's own name and a number. The complete reference to what those codes mean, the categories Tocklai sorts its releases into, and how a candidate plant becomes a released clone at all.
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Clone, cultivar, seedling: the working vocabulary
A cultivar is an assemblage of plants selected for a particular character and kept distinct, uniform, and stable when propagated4. A clone is one mother plant multiplied by cutting, so every bush in a block is genetically that single plant, repeated. A seedling grows from open, uncontrolled pollination, so no two bushes in an old seed garden are quite the same plant. A biclonal seed variety sits between the two on purpose: breeders cross two clones and plant the resulting hybrid seed.
Reading a name: what the prefix tells you
Each prefix names who released the plant and by what method, on record in the Tea Board of India's own list of approved planting materials for Northeast India1.
| Prefix or form | Stands for | What it signals | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| TV | Tocklai Vegetative | A clone released by Tocklai's own breeding programme, in a series that runs from TV1 to TV31 | TV1, TV23 |
| TTRI | Tocklai Tea Research Institute | A clone released under its own numbered series, distinct from the older TV line, carrying the institute's current name | TTRI 1, TTRI 2 |
| A garden or estate name plus a serial number | The estate that supplied the mother plant | A clone selected by TRA in association with the estate from its old tea sections, kept under that estate's name rather than a Tocklai number | Heeleakah 2314, Bagmari 10, Koomsong 23 |
| TS | Tocklai biclonal seed stock | A biclonal seed stock, not a clone at all: seed from a controlled cross rather than a cutting | TS 397 |
| TSS | Tocklai biclonal seed stock | A biclonal cross | TSS 1, crossing TV13 with TV17 |
The garden-and-number form is the largest category by count: 106 entries across South Bank, North Bank, and Cachar in Assam alone, with further series for the Dooars, the Terai, Tripura, and Darjeeling carrying the total past 1501. Tea World2 records how clone selection in Northeast India has shifted over time. The earliest selections were pulled from mature sections of established commercial estates or from seedling populations already in the ground, while more recent selections increasingly start from the progeny of a deliberate clonal cross, plus fresh germplasm collected in old estate fields.
The three grades a released clone carries
The Tea Board's own list1 sorts every released clone into one of three categories, marked directly on the registry with one, two, or three asterisks, and each category names a different trade-off between tonnage and cup quality.
| Category | Mark | The trade-off | Stated yield potential |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | * | Above-average yield and quality together | about 3,000 to 3,500 kilograms of made tea per hectare (roughly 2,700 to 3,100 pounds per acre) |
| Quality | ** | High cup quality, average yield | about 2,500 to 2,800 kilograms per hectare (roughly 2,200 to 2,500 pounds per acre) |
| Yield | *** | Average quality, high tonnage | 4,000 kilograms per hectare or more (roughly 3,600 pounds per acre or more) |
What the second half of a name encodes: parentage
The Tea Board's registry marks each clone's botanical parentage directly against its number, using a short set of codes: A for Assam type, AC hybrid for an Assam and China cross, Ass. hyb. for a broader Assam-type hybrid, Cam for Cambod parentage, Cam/Spp. hyb. for a Cambod and other-species cross, and Ch. hyb. for a China hybrid. TV1 carries the AC hybrid mark, on record in the Tea Board's own registry1 as an Assam and China cross. TV23 carries the Cam mark.
How a candidate becomes a released clone
The Assam Tribune's account3 of the TTRI-series releases, TTRI 1 and TTRI 2, lays out the pipeline in practice. TTRI 1 began as a seedling population selected from the Betjan Jat seed nursery of Cinnamara Tea Estate, and was planted out at Tocklai in 1980. It was field-tested against three named control clones, TV1, S3A3, and TA-17, and measured roughly 35 percent above their mean yield, with an expected commercial yield of 3,500 to 4,000 kilograms per hectare, about 3,100 to 3,600 pounds to the acre, and a leaf suited to CTC manufacture.
TTRI 2 followed a parallel path, drawn from an early germplasm collection of seed jats catalogued as Stock 19 at Tocklai, tested for orthodox manufacture, and projected at 3,500 kilograms per hectare or better. Thirty years passed between that 1980 planting and the release of both clones, together, at the Tea Research Association's 50th annual general meeting in Kolkata in September 2010.
The seed path: naming a controlled cross
A TS or TSS number follows a different assembly than a clone's, because the stock it names is seed, not a cutting. The Tea Board's registry1 records each biclonal stock's actual cross, not just its release number: TS 397 crosses accession 19.29.13 with accession 19.35.2, and TS 449 crosses that same 19.29.13 parent with a different second parent, 19.31.14. TSS 1 crosses TV13 with TV17.
Not every name in that parentage record is still recommended for new planting on its own account. T78, a Darjeeling-series clone, carries a note in the Tea Board's own list marking it not recommended for future planting, though usable as the generative clone of a biclonal seed stock, TS 569, a hill-areas seed stock1.
Sources
- "List of Approved Planting Materials, Rehabilitation Crops and Approved Shade Trees"1, Tea Research Association, Tocklai Tea Research Institute, via Tea Board of India, on the TV, TTRI, garden-series, TS, and TSS clone and seed-stock listings, the botanical parentage codes, the Standard/Quality/Yield categorization and its stated yield ranges, and the T78 and TS 569 parentage note.
- Clones of Different Countries2, Tea World, Krishna Kanta Handiqui State Open University, on the historical shift in Northeast Indian clone-selection method.
- "Tocklai institute develops 2 tea clones,"3 The Assam Tribune, on the TTRI 1 and TTRI 2 release pipeline, their origin nurseries, control-clone trial results, and the TTRI naming.
- International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants4, Ninth Edition, ISHS, on the definition of a cultivar (Art. 2.3).