The Coffee PlantThe coffee, or coffea, plant is a member of the Rubiaceae family. This is very big family that includes more than 6,000 species of tropical trees and shrubs.
Other well known members of the Rubiaceae family include cinchona, from which quinine, gardenia and bedstraw were extracted.
Carolus Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist, was the first to describe the genus coffea sometime in the 1700s.
There are more than forty species of coffea, and some botanist disagree on exactly which plays belong in this genus and which should be excluded.
All, however, agree that coffea Arabica and Coffea canephora, the latter of which sometimes known as Coffea Robusta, are the major players.
The Coffee Plant
