Coffee Plant (Coffea arabica)

Coffea arabica is a flowering shrub or small tree of the madder family (Rubiaceae), growing nine to twelve meters in the wild, with opposite elliptic-ovate leaves, clustered white flowers and red or purple two-seeded drupes, coffee cherries, whose seeds are the coffee bean. Its natural populations are restricted to the highland forests of southwestern Ethiopia, South Sudan and Yemen, an Afromontane range rather than a lowland one. Arabica is believed to be the first coffee species ever cultivated and remains the dominant cultivar, supplying roughly sixty percent of world coffee production. The IUCN lists it as Endangered in the wild, chiefly from climate pressure and deforestation on its narrow native range, a status distinct from the security of the cultivated crop grown across the tropics today.