Herb to Know: Clove

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• Syzygium aromaticum
• (Sih-ZIJ-ee-um ah-ro-MAT-ih-kum)
• Family Myrtaceae
• Tree

How would pumpkin pie or spice cake taste without cloves, that pungent and most aromatic of spices? Those little brown sticks (“clove” comes from the Latin clavus, “nail”) that stud the Easter ham and holiday pomanders are actually the unopened flower buds of a tropical tree related to allspice and guavas.

The genus Syzygium, to which the clove tree belongs, comprises about 500 species of trees or shrubs native to the Old World Tropics. S. aromaticum itself is native to the Moluccas (Spice Islands), part of modern Indonesia. It is an evergreen tree growing about 40 feet tall with smooth gray bark and 5-inch-long, glossy opposite leaves that resemble bay leaves. The 1/4-inch flowers in clusters at the ends of the branches have four tiny petals surrounded by a long, four-parted calyx (the “stem” of the clove) and numerous stamens. The buds are pink, but the calyx changes from yellow to deep red-pink after the stamens fall. The fruit, called mother-of-cloves, is an edible purple berry about 1 inch long and 1/2 inch across. The entire plant is ­aromatic.

The generic name, Syzygium, comes from a Greek word meaning “yoked together” and refers to the union, in some species, of the petal tips into a cap that covers the stamens. The meaning of the specific name, aromaticum, is obvious.

Cloves were known at least 2,000 years ago in China. They are believed to have been brought by Javanese envoys to the Chinese court, where the emperor decreed that every visitor hold a clove in his mouth when addressing him. Arab traders introduced cloves into Europe by the fourth century A.D., and the Portuguese were trading for cloves in the Moluccas by 1511. Although clove trees grew on many islands in the Moluccas, the Dutch set out to control the clove trade in the seventeenth century by destroying all trees except those on a single island, which they controlled. In 1625 alone, 65,000 clove trees were cut down. The Dutch held the monopoly on cloves for about 150 years. During this period, any unauthorized person caught growing or carrying cloves or seedlings might be put to death. Finally, the French smuggled seedling clove trees to Mauritius, an island east of Africa in the Indian Ocean, and by 1800, clove trees were being cultivated on a number of islands in the Indian Ocean and in the New World. They are now grown commercially in Madagascar, Tanzania, Jamaica, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia, Réunion, the Seychelles, and the Comoro Islands. Zanzibar and Pemba, islands off the east coast of Africa that are part of Tanzania, produce about 90 percent of the world’s cloves.

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