Café Marron - Meet The Endangered
Café Marron (Ramosmania rodriguesii)
Scattered across the western Indian Ocean like a string of pearls lie the Mascarene Islands, a volcanic archipelago that includes Réunion, Mauritius and Rodrigues.
It is on Rodrigues - the smallest and most isolated of the three - that we find Café Marron, a 1.5 m (5 ft) tall tree related to the coffee plant (Fam. Rubiaceae) which once ranked amongst the rarest plants in the world.
It was prized locally due to the supposed healing powers of an infusion made from the bark and leaves, hence its common name which translates to “brown coffee”. This voracious demand led to it being declared extinct in the 1950s. But in 1979 a single specimen was discovered by a schoolboy and subsequently sent on to botanical researchers at Kew Gardens in London.
It took more than two decades for botanists to figure out an elaborate hand-pollination process, which finally bore fruit in 2003. Hundreds of plants now exist, and several have been returned to Rodrigues where Café Marron grows wild once again.
IUCN: Critically Endangered (CR)
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