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.
What TeaHQ records about these plants, and what it holds back
The botanical records exist — a couple of hundred of them, each with its plant family, the parts used, how it is prepared and what it tastes like. What most of them do not carry is a safety block, and the reason is evidential rather than editorial: a statement about what a plant may interact with, or who should be careful of it, asserts something about the world that needs a source of a different kind, and TeaHQ has retrieved those for very few. So a botanical page here will tell you what the plant is and how it is drunk, and will not tell you whether it is safe for you. The categories on this page are how the trade groups them; the evidence posture is documented in `docs/health-evidence-posture.md`.