Herbal infusions are not tea
Tea means Camellia sinensis. Everything else steeped in hot water — chamomile, rooibos, peppermint, hibiscus — is a botanical infusion, or tisane. This is not pedantry: the two behave differently in the cup. Tea leaf carries catechins that extract quickly and turn harsh, which is why tea brewing is largely about restraint. Most botanicals carry nothing comparable, so they take boiling water and long steeps that would ruin a green tea. Almost every mistake people make with herbal infusions comes from applying tea’s rules to material that does not share tea’s chemistry.
The categories are commercial and traditional, not botanical
Chamomile and lavender sit in the same shop category and belong to entirely different plant families. Rooibos and honeybush are botanically close and are sold in quite different places. The groupings you meet — calming, digestive, floral, spice, caffeine-free — describe how these plants have conventionally been used and marketed, not what they are or what they share. They are useful for navigation and unreliable for anything else.
What a category name does and does not tell you
A category name tells you what a plant has traditionally been taken for, and how a shop expects you to find it. It does not tell you whether the tradition is borne out, how strong any evidence is, or whether the plant is appropriate for a given person. Those are separate questions with separate answers, and a category label answers none of them. TeaHQ records the groupings because readers navigate by them, and states their limits on every page rather than once.
How TeaHQ will handle these when the catalogue is built
Botanical records are not in this catalogue yet, and the reason is evidential rather than editorial: a herbal safety block asserts things about the world — what a plant may interact with, who should be careful — and TeaHQ has not yet retrieved sources for any of them. The structure exists and is documented in `docs/herbal-data-model-readiness.md`; the records arrive when there is something to attach them to. The categories below are the navigational scaffolding, written first because they can be written honestly without any of that evidence.