Tagged: fire ecology

From a Sleeping Seed to a Four-Year Field

Before a single leaf is cut for the heap, a rooibos field has already had a stranger life than the calm cup suggests. Here is how the red bush actually gets planted, grown, and rested, from a seed that refuses to wake up to a field given years off to recover.

How Wild Rooibos Is Harvested, and Why It Rests Every Other Year

Wild rooibos is not planted, ploughed, or sown in rows. It is cut by hand from the veld on a rule harvesters worked out mostly by watching what killed a bush and what let it come back, later confirmed by a decade of field research.

Fynbos

Fynbos is the fine-leaved shrubland that covers South Africa's southwestern Cape, one of the six floral kingdoms of the world and the ground rooibos calls home. What the shrubland is made of, why fire keeps it alive, how rooibos's own trick of soil chemistry fits it for the ground, and the protection and the threats the whole system now lives under.