Redbush Tea

Organic Redbush Tea

We are really delighted to be able to offer our customers the finest grade of organically grown Redbush Tea. Our Organic Redbush comes entirely from the top 10% of the rooibos crop, and is fully certified by the UK Soil Association, Eco- Cert and UK Register of Organic Food Standards (UK ROFS).

Organic Redbush is available now from good health food stores as well as by mail order from our online store. The box is made entirely from timber sourced from managed sustainable forests, as are our non-organic teas. The bag paper in all our products is also non-chlorine bleached.

African Cave Art and the Organic box design

We wanted to choose something that evoked the area where rooibos is cultivated and that was truly unique to this culture. It was the San tribes, who for more than 25,000 years roamed throughout the area, and it was these same tribes who used rooibos as an herbal medicine, and so the link with them and this amazing tea is inextricable. Their cave art still exists all over the Cederberg Mountains, and into many areas of southern Africa. Not only do we owe to them the secret of rooibos but they also left behind a stunning legacy of their lives.

Through their art and their incredible powers of observation they bring animals leaping from the walls of caves and warriors with spears raised at the end of the hunt. It is thought that religion played a substantial part in inspiring many of the paintings. They often depict the trance and its effects. The paintings are difficult to date, some may be hundreds of years old and others much more recent. One thing however is clear that their paint technology was outstanding, allowing the paintings to survive for centuries. Mixed from pigments made from powdered rocks and clays, blended with animal fat and blood, resin, plant sap and egg, and applied using fine animal hair brushes or chewed grasses and sticks, they were truly inventive.

When 18th Century European immigrants first found San rock art they thought it to be as crude as the people who painted them, 'just Bushmen' was their attitude with two-dimensional accounts of their life. They called them San, meaning literally 'outside'. Small bands of these Bushmen were actually paraded around Victorian England in freak shows. They were seen as something not entirely human; their extraordinary language is a series of clicking sounds, which early anthropologists regarded as little more than farmyard noises.