Tagged: conservation

1. 01 The plant · 23 Jun 2026 Almost Every Cup of Rooibos Comes From One Plant, Picked in the 1930s Wild rooibos grows across roughly 600,000 hectares of the Cederberg and Bokkeveld as at least four genetically distinct types. Nearly every cultivated bush you have ever steeped descends from just one of them, selected in the 1930s, and the wild relatives that did not make the cut are still out there, mostly untasted.
2. 02 The place · 29 Nov 2025 More of the Cederberg Is Under a Conservation Pact Than Under Rooibos Rooibos farms in the Cederberg have signed more land into formal conservation agreements than the entire industry cultivates, a corridor that also keeps a camera-trapped leopard population, a dying cedar, and the plant's own wild backup moving.
3. 03 The plant Fynbos Fynbos is the fine-leaved shrubland that covers South Africa's southwestern Cape and the ground rooibos calls home. What the shrubland is made of, why fire keeps it alive, and the protection and the threats the whole system now lives under.
4. 04 The place The Sustainability of Rooibos Sustainability in rooibos is four subjects rather than one: the fynbos the crop is planted on, the wild plant that still grows unfarmed above it, the certification marks that each promise something different, and the question of who owns the land and who receives the money. This is the canonical account of all four, with the figures each of them rests on.