Card of the Day - 2023-05-22

Carreras flowers all the year round
Carreras Ltd [tobacco : UK] "Flowers all the Year Round" (1977) 10/50 - C151-830

And so to our final clue, the Camellia.

The link here is that it is from a variety of this plant which tea actually comes - our plant being Camellia Japonica and the tea one being Camellia Sinensis. So we got away with the link to iced tea here as well.

The Japonica suffix simply means that it originated in Japan, where it was much prized, and specimens can still be seen around the Emperor`s Palace. It is a beautiful plant, and often, but not always, has many petals per bloom.

The Sinensis suffix means the tea comes from China, India, or Cambodia. The word "Sinensis" comes from "Sino" which is a prefix meaning relating to China. Its flower is more likely to have just a few petals, though the tea comes from the leaves and leaf buds, not the flowers, so you can harvest away and still enjoy the flowers. Making the tea is quite specialised, for the buds and young leaves, which contain more chlorophyll, make the "green" tea, and the larger older leaves brew up to be darker, so they make either Oolong or "black" tea. 

Now there is only one code because this set was issued twenty one years after our original World Tobacco Issues Index.  And sadly the only description in the modern version is "FLOWERS ALL THE YEAR ROUND. Nd. (50)".  Though at the top of the header for those sets it does tell us that they were issued between 1976 and 1980, and measure 70 x 35 m/m, so slightly longer and slightly shorter than the standard size of a card.

They also all had special albums, but they were of a very different type to the normal stapled ones, having a kind of plastic binder strip.