The genus Warburgia belongs to the Canellaceae, a small family of tropical aromatic tree species important for their antibacterial and antifungal medicinal qualities amongst many other functions. Many published protocols for nucleic acid isolation failed to yield sufficiently good quality amounts for analysis. We have therefore developed a simple and fast CTAB (cetyl-trimethyl ammonium bromide)based extraction protocol for routine isolation of high-quality nucleic acids. Good quality genomic DNA (gDNA) and RNA was obtained and was suitable for PCR amplification, restriction endonuclease digestion, Southern blotting and RT-PCR, respectively.