Clove

Clove is usually raised from seed; only pollinated seed will germinate, so buds taken from a spice jar will not grow. Seed is pressed onto the surface of moist, free-draining, organically rich loam similar to an orchid mix rather than buried, and young seedlings are kept shaded by taller plants for their first couple of years before being potted on once they reach about an inch tall.

Clove needs a hot, humid, tropical climate with 50 to 70 inches of rain a year and temperatures that never fall below 59°F, so trees are planted in coastal areas up to roughly 200 metres altitude and watered regularly through heat or drought; where the climate is unsuitable, it can instead be grown as a container or houseplant.

Flower buds are picked while still unopened, once they have turned from pale green to a deep pink or red but before the flower itself opens; picking is done by hand or hastened with an ethylene-releasing plant hormone. Because harvest seasons differ from country to country, freshly picked cloves reach world markets throughout the year, and after picking the buds are traditionally dried in the sun until they harden into the familiar dark brown spice.

Cloves flavor meats, baked goods, ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, curries, chutneys, desserts, and spiced drinks such as wassail and clove tea, and they are one of the five spices in Chinese five-spice powder.

The buds and their oil are also used in toothpaste, soap, cosmetics, perfume, and incense, and in parts of Asia dried cloves are smoked in clove cigarettes.

For centuries cloves have served as a food preservative, and in Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine traditions people have used them for complaints such as toothache and indigestion; in ancient China, envoys reportedly held cloves in the mouth to perfume their breath before addressing the emperor.

Clove originated on a handful of volcanic islands in the Maluku, or Moluccas, archipelago of Indonesia, where wild trees grew nowhere else before the 17th century. Ancient trade carried the buds to India by about 1700 BC and to southern Europe by the first century AD, with Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, established as a trading hub by the 10th to 12th centuries. European powers fought to control the source from the 16th century, and the Dutch restricted cultivation to Ambon before clove seed was smuggled out in the 18th century to found plantations in Seychelles, Zanzibar, and other tropical colonies; production is now centred in Indonesia, India, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, and Tanzania, alongside newer growing regions such as Brazil, Mexico, and Kenya.