Redbush

Sitting in her ocher-walled office with its tin roof and itinerant chickens, Mma Ramotswe sips redbush tea and ponders the ethics of her cases: the wife who wants the detective to steal back the car her husband has stolen; the grief-stricken mother who, with Mma Ramotswe's deft application of a little blackmail, might be reunited with a young grandson.

I'm thinking I'm in for a sermon on decaffeinated redbush, or the antioxidant properties of organic camomile.

Herbal teas: redbush, rosehip tea, peppermint etc.

In the Cape region of South Africa the leaves of the wild redbush [Aspalathus linearis (Burm. f.) R. Dahlgr.] are collected by farmers for export as Rooibos tea.

I shall not write about the estimable maté, Ilex paraguayensis, which is a holly, nor of rooibos, redbush (Aspalathus linearis), of the pea family, nor of any of the flowery infusions from camomile to hibiscus which have usurped the name of tea.

One of the few foodstuffs of the indigenous Khoikhoi and San people that European colonists adopted with any enthusiasm was a tea made from the dried, fermented leaf tips of a scrubby bushveld plant, Aspalathus linearis, known as redbush or rooibos.