What this catalogue can and cannot tell you

One hundred and fifty botanical pages, twenty of them checked against a taxonomic authority, and none of them making a claim about a human body. What that means when you are reading one.

foundational

What is checked

Twenty botanicals carry a citation to the USDA GRIN taxonomy covering the accepted botanical name, the author citation, the plant family, the common names and the distribution. That check found three errors in this catalogue and corrected them: a chamomile alias that belonged to a different species, cassia’s accepted binomial, and elder’s family.

What is synthesis

Everything else. History, culture, production, flavour, preparation and buying advice are TeaHQ’s own writing, and no external source stands behind them. That is honest for describing what people do and it would not be honest for describing what a plant does, which is why this catalogue only does the first.

Brewing parameters are category-typical

Every parameter set on a botanical page is typical practice for its category rather than a measurement of that plant, and each one says so in its own note. Read them as a starting point. Per-plant measurements do not exist in any source this project holds, and inventing 150 of them would be the kind of fabrication the rest of this catalogue refuses.

No safety claim, and what that is not

A botanical page carries no safety information because the entity has no field that could hold one. Two plants — chamomile and liquorice — have a safety record that exists and is held unpublished, and their pages say so. The absence of a safety note is not a statement that a plant is safe, and every page says that too.

More foundational guides