The Cape mountains run along the Cape Fold Belt in the south of South Africa - from the Langkloof through the Outeniqua to the Tsitsikamma, on the border of the Eastern and Western Cape. It is a land of clean mountain fynbos: steep slopes, humid sea winds and poor soils on which hundreds of endemic plant species grow that are found nowhere else. It is precisely these unspoilt mountain areas of the Cape provinces that give honeybush its origin.
This plant - known indigenously as “bergtee” (mountain tea) - was wild-harvested in these mountains for centuries. Science described it as a beverage as early as the 19th century, and in the 1930s it caught the attention of traders, but the volumes from wild harvesting were too small and unreliable for the world market.
It remained a cottage industry until the mid-1990s. The turning point came in the early 1990s, when renewed interest in this fynbos plant launched cultivation trials led by Dr J. H. de Lange of the National Botanical Institute (today SANBI). Successful cultivation in the late 1990s opened the way to export; today six species of the genus Cyclopia are grown commercially in the region.
