Brabejum stellatifolium is the only member of the genus Brabejum, sometimes incorrectly spelled Brabeium. This name is based on the word brabeion, which is Greek for sceptre and may refer to the inflorescence. But, a brabeion was also the prize awarded at the Pythian games held at Delphi, the prize being a crown of bay or laurel leaves, so it could equally refer to the vague resemblance between Brabejum leaves and those of the bay or laurel tree. The specific name stellatifolium means that the leaves radiate like the points of a star, which they do. The vernacular names bitteramandel (bitter almond) and wild almond are derived from the resemblance of the fruit to the almond. The bitter taste is due to the presence of cyanogenic glycosides that liberate prussic acid (the toxic principle) when eaten. The ghoe- in the names ghoeboontjie and ghoekoffie is the original Khoi name for the kernels of the fruits. Boontjie is the Afrikaans for bean and koffie (coffee), refers to the use made of the fruits.

Despite the resemblance of the fruits to the almond, the bitter almond is not an almond at all but a member of the protea family. Although by no means the most spectacular member in a pretty spectacular family, it is nevertheless of great interest to the botanist and the phytogeographer. What makes it fascinating to them is that Brabejum has no close allies among its African protea relatives, but is most closely related to Macadamia, a proteaceous genus that occurs an ocean away in Australia and New Caledonia. The protea family is divided into two subfamilies, the Proteoideae and the Grevilleoideae which are distinguished on one simple character: in Proteoideae a single flower is borne in the axil of a bract, while in Grevilleoideae two flowers are borne in the axil of a bract. Brabejum is the only African member of the family that has two flowers in the axil of a bract. All the other members of its subfamily are found mainly in Australia, but also in Malaysia, South East Asia and South America. The protea family is also an ancient family, a descendent of Glossopteris that lived more than 200 million years ago, and with fossils that date back to Permian times. It seems to prove the theory of continental drift, and points back to an ancient time when South America, Africa, India, Antarctica and Australia were all one continent, Gondwanaland, that split up and drifted apart about 130 million years ago. The family must have evolved and flourished on that super continent, and millions of years later its descendants still occur on the pieces that are now separated by thousands of miles of ocean. Brabejum is the lone survivor of its branch of the family tree on the African piece of Gondwanaland.

The bitteramandel played a starring role in the early colonial history of South Africa and has a number of unique distinctions. The name bitteramandel was the first to be applied to an indigenous poisonous plant when van Riebeeck mentioned it by that name in April 1654 in connection with it being a potential pig food. He was fully aware that the fruits were poisonous, and that the indigenous Khoi people ate them after treating them to get rid of the poison. His plan was to experiment with various pre-treatments to see if they would make a suitable pig food.

The wild almond is the culprit in the first recorded case in South Africa of a human death by poisoning. One of the members of Jan Wintervogel's 1655 expedition died from eating too much bitter amandelen.

It also featured in a dispute over opposing territorial claims between the European colonists and the Khoi. After the 1659-60 war between them, a vital item in the ensuing peace negotiations regarded the claim by the Khoi people to a population of these trees which was now part of the colonial settlement, but had been theirs until then. They claimed ownership or at very least access to collect the fruits and to dig up the roots for winter food. The Dutch did not grant this petition saying that it would give them too much opportunity to damage the colony and the colonists (they regarded them as thieving, marauding and murderous), and in any case they wished to use the seeds themselves, to plant a defensive hedge.

This project had been mooted the year before, it involved the planting of a live hedge to form the eastern boundary of the settlement. Building such boundaries was something that was apparently done quite often in Holland, where the Graven and Heren (counts, earls etc) used canals or ditches or anything that cattle could not cross to demarcate the area of their jurisdiction. The plan was to plant bitteramandel trees along the 13 km bow-shaped eastern boundary from the mouth of the Salt River passed Ruijterwacht in Rondebosch, beside the Black River over Wynberg Hill ending up at Kirstenbosch, and to leave a 3,6 m strip unplowed to encourage the growth of fast-growing brambles and thorny plants so that the hedge would be thick and dense so that no livestock could be driven through it. There were openings, or posts, at various points through which people and livestock could pass.

This was the first comprehensive frontier for the colony until the Grootvisrivier was proclaimed the eastern boundary in 1798. In any event, although it grew fast and well, the boundary hedge never performed the service it was expected to. One of the first things they realised was that the good grazing was on the other side, and the spread of the colony could not be limited by that artificial boundary. Nevertheless, parts of the hedge in Bishopscourt and at Kirstenbosch are still alive and well and older than any existing man made structure from that time, including the Castle. Our portion of the hedge was proclaimed a national monument in 1936 and the Bishopscourt section in 1945.

Brabejum stellatifolium was one of the earliest Cape plants to be introduced to Europe and was published by Breynius c. 1668.