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.
A tea bush in an Assam garden is planted under one of a small number of naming systems, and every one of them is a record, not a brand. This office already carries the deep, individual stories behind several of those names: what a clone actually is and why the valley switched to it, what a biclonal seed variety solves that a clone cannot, the Cambod lineage folded into clones like TV23, and the purple-leaf germplasm still waiting on a name of its own. What none of those records lay out in one place is the naming system itself: what TV, TTRI, TS, and a garden's own name actually signal, the categories Tocklai sorts its releases into, and how a candidate plant becomes a released clone at all. This is that record.
Clone, cultivar, seedling: the working vocabulary
A cultivar is the umbrella term, any cultivated variety kept true to type on purpose. Assam plants three different kinds of cultivar under it. A clone is one mother plant multiplied by cutting, so every bush in a block is genetically that single plant, repeated; the full case for why the valley switched to clonal planting, and what got lost along the way, is set out here. 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 named, proven clones and plant the resulting hybrid seed, documented in full in its own record. Every code in the rest of this record names one of those three kinds of planting material.
Reading a name: what the prefix tells you
The letters in front of a clone's number are not decoration. 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 India.
| Prefix or form | Stands for | What it signals | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| TV | Tocklai Vegetative | A clone released by Tocklai's own breeding programme, numbered in the order it was released, starting from TV1 | TV1, TV23 |
| TTRI | Tocklai Tea Research Institute | A clone released under the institute's current name, adopted in a 2014 renaming already on record here, rather than the older TV line | TTRI 1, TTRI 2 |
| A garden or estate name plus a serial number | The estate that supplied the mother plant | A clone selected from an estate's own old planting and kept under that estate's name rather than a Tocklai number, though Tocklai still tests and approves it before it reaches the Board's list | Heeleakah 2314, Bagmari 10, Koomsong 23 |
| TS | Tocklai Seed | A biclonal, or occasionally polyclonal, seed stock, not a clone at all: seed from a controlled cross rather than a cutting | TS 397 |
| TSS | A Tocklai Seed Stock variant | A biclonal cross whose two named parents are themselves already-released TV clones, rather than raw, unnamed garden accessions | 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 garden series for the Dooars, the Terai, Tripura, and Darjeeling carrying the Tea Board's full registry past 150. Tea World, an initiative of Krishna Kanta Handiqui State Open University, records how the selection method behind that whole category has shifted over time: the earliest selections in Northeast India 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 garden name survives the method change. A Heeleakah or a Bagmari clone still carries its home estate's name into the Tea Board's own registry, whichever way its parent stock was actually assembled.
The three grades a released clone carries
Tocklai does not release a clone as an undifferentiated "improvement." The Tea Board's own list 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, the safe default for general planting | 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, bred to taste rather than tonnage | about 2,500 to 2,800 kilograms per hectare (roughly 2,200 to 2,500 pounds per acre) |
| Yield | *** | Average quality, high tonnage, bred for volume above all | 4,000 kilograms per hectare or more (roughly 3,600 pounds per acre or more) |
A garden reading its own planting stock off this record is not choosing a flavor. It is choosing which side of that trade it wants a given field to sit on, before a single cutting goes in the ground.
What the second half of a name encodes: parentage
Past the prefix, 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-type hybrid. TV1, the founding clone, carries the AC hybrid mark, matching what this record already carries in full about its Assam and China parentage. TV23 carries the Cam mark, the same clone this record's own account of the Cambod lineage already names as carrying that third botanical parent into the valley's cup. The mark comes off an official registry, not a taster's guess, three letters or fewer stating what crossed with what before a single leaf from that clone was ever plucked.
How a candidate becomes a released clone
A number does not get assigned the day a promising bush is found. The Assam Tribune's account of two recent 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, the same ground already on record here as TV1's own source ground, 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. More than three decades passed between that 1980 planting and the eventual release of both clones, in the same round of releases this record already dates to the 2010s. Both carry the TTRI prefix rather than a TV number, marking them as releases made under the institute's post-renaming name.
That is the shape of the pipeline behind every number in this record, TV, TTRI, or garden-named: select a candidate from a nursery, a germplasm collection, or a deliberate cross, plant it out, test it against named controls over years of field data, and only then assign it a name a planter can order stock by.
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 registry 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. Those accession numbers are unreleased garden material, not clones with names of their own. TSS 1 breaks that pattern. Its own registry entry reads simply "TV13 x TV17," a biclonal cross between two plants that had already earned full clone releases in their own right, rather than a cross of two anonymous accessions.
Not every name in that parentage record is still recommended for new planting on its own account. T78, an older clone, carries a note in the Tea Board's own list marking it unfit for future planting, yet the same list credits it as the generative parent behind a newer biclonal stock, TS 569. A garden cannot order T78 for a new field, but a breeder can still write it into a new stock's parentage.
The frontier: an accession without a name yet
Every code documented above marks a plant that has already cleared the pipeline: selected, propagated, tested, and released under a name a garden can order by. Not every promising accession has. This record's own account of Assam's purple-leaf tea already sets out the case in full: nine high-anthocyanin lines sitting in Tocklai's own germplasm bank, measured and catalogued under accession numbers like TRA St. 817, chemistry documented to the microgram, and still without a TV, TTRI, or TS mark of their own. Naming a clone, on this record's own evidence, is the last step of a long pipeline, not the first. That is exactly the step still standing between a germplasm-bank accession and a name a planter can order by.
Sources
- "List of Approved Planting Materials, Rehabilitation Crops and Approved Shade Trees", 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 Countries, Tea World, Krishna Kanta Handiqui State Open University, on the historical shift in Northeast Indian clone-selection method and the TV and garden-series release counts.
- "Tocklai institute develops 2 tea clones," The Assam Tribune, on the TTRI 1 and TTRI 2 release pipeline, their origin nurseries, control-clone trial results, and the TTRI naming.
- "The Clone Wars: Charge of the Assamica Plant," Rujani Tea, on the working definitions of clone, cultivar, and seedling.