Coffea

Strong coffee

Arabica coffee and robusta coffee are the only varieties humans use to brew their cup of comfort. Yet to date 110 wild species have already been found today. Ten of these were only discovered in the last 25 years by researchers at Meise Botanic Garden. The Botanic Garden has been the knowledge centre for wild coffee species in Central Africa for more than a century, collaborating on genetic and chemical research on coffee. These studies use advanced DNA analysis techniques and spectrometry. This unravels the relationship between different coffee varieties and analyses their chemical contents.  

Over 60% of wild coffee species are threatened with extinction due to the destruction of their natural habitats and climate change. Preserving and studying wild coffee plants in botanical gardens may be a last resort... Wild coffee varieties still possess properties that have been lost in our cultivated crops, which may be important for the food security of future generations. Our cultivated crops are much more vulnerable to diseases than the wild species. 

In the past, extinction was close. Coffee rust, a fungus that attacks the leaves of coffee plants, almost caused the end of our coffee culture. Our ancestors were powerless against this fungus, which destroyed most of the Coffea arabica plantations. In 1900, the Belgian Lucien Linden presented a new coffee variety from Congo at the World's Fair in Paris: it was described as robust and rust-resistant. Later, this coffee species was found to be identical to a species described by Emile Laurent, botanist at Meise Botanic Garden, and to a third species described in Cameroon. The latter was the oldest discovery, and so the botanical name of the species is Coffea canephora.  Commercially, the species is still known as robusta coffee. These 3 scientists probably saved our daily cup of coffee. Robusta coffee plays an increasingly important role as Coffea arabica is more susceptible to diseases and grows mainly in those areas where climate impact is greatest.

Want to see coffee bushes? Discover them in several greenhouses of the Plant Palace, the economically important species are in the greenhouse of the Anthropogenic Biome.  The research collection is housed in the Green Ark and is not open to the public.