English

Noun

redbush ‎(uncountable)

1. rooibos (tea)
   • 2002 January 27, Alida Becker, “Miss Marple of Botswana”, in The New York Times:

     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.

   • 2014, Paula Daly, Keep Your Friends Close:

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

   • 2015, Sarah Myhill, Sustainable Medicine: whistle-blowing on 21st century medical practice:

     Herbal teas: redbush, rosehip tea, peppermint etc.

2. rooibos (shrub of genus Aspalathus)
   • 2006, Fary Peterson, Dryland agriculture, page 893:

     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.

   • 2007, John Charles Griffiths, Tea: The Drink that Changed the World, page 9:

     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.

   • 2010, Will Sellick, The Imperial African Cookery Book: Recipes from English-speaking Africa:

     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.

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