Abstract:In order to understand the genetic diversity and evolutionary characteristics of phenotypic traits of 89 wild tea trees from Yingde, Guangdong Province, the coefficients of variation, genetic diversity index, phenotypic differentiation coefficient of phenotypic traits were analyzed. The results showed that the variation coefficient of 18 leaf traits of 89 resources ranged from 12.90% to 43.11%, with an average of 27.86%. The average genetic diversity index was 1.12, and the phenotypic differentiation coefficient ranged from 17.07% to 45.51%, with an average of 33.40%. The cluster analysis results showed that when the Euclidean distance was 21.5, all the materials could be divided into four categories, and the classification results had correlation with the geographical distribution. The variance analysis showed that there were significant differences in quantitative traits between and within different populations. The correlation analysis showed that leaf length was significantly correlated with leaf width, leaf area, leaf vein number, ratio of leaf length to width and leaf shape. The leaf shape was significantly correlated with ratio of leaf length to width and leaf vein number. There was a significant correlation between leaf base and leaf width. The ratio of leaf length to width had negatively significant correlation with leaf tip and leaf direction. Therefore, there were abundant genetic diversity in wild tea resources in Yingde, and the types of wild tea germplasm resource were primitive, evolutionary and intermediate, but the evolutionary and intermediate types were the main ones.