Where does Rooibos (red bush tea) come from?
Rooibos comes from the Cederberg mountains in South Africa's Western Cape. Its name is Afrikaans for 'red bush', and the needle-like leaves of this shrub make a caffeine-free red brew now drunk worldwide.
A shrub of the Cederberg
Rooibos, Aspalathus linearis, is a broom-like shrub of the pea family and part of the fynbos, the Cape's 'fine bush' vegetation. It is native to a small area of the Cederberg, north of Cape Town, where summers are hot and dry and winters wet. It grows between 200 and 1,000 metres above sea level and sends its roots two metres or more down to reach water. Left alone, it grows up to 1.5 metres tall.
From mountain slopes to farms
The earliest records of rooibos tea date from the late 19th century, as a traditional drink of Khoi-descended people of the Cederberg. They climbed the mountains to cut leaves from wild plants and beat them with wooden clubs or hammers. In 1904 Benjamin Ginsberg, a Russian immigrant from a tea-trading family, began trading in it, and he later sold it abroad as 'mountain tea'. From 1930 the Clanwilliam doctor Pieter le Fras Nortier worked out how to grow it from seed, and farms took over from wild harvests.
Why people say China
Rooibos is made much like tea, and outside southern Africa it is often called red tea or redbush tea. Ginsberg modelled its curing on the Chinese way of making Keemun, a black tea, fermenting the leaves in barrels. Today the cut leaves are bruised, left to oxidise in heaps, then dried in the sun, turning from green to red. But rooibos is no relative of the tea plant, Camellia sinensis.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org ↗ · wipo.int ↗
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