Clove

The clove is the dried flower-bud of Syzygium aromaticum, an evergreen tree native, like nutmeg, to the Moluccas or Spice Islands of Indonesia; the name comes from the Latin clavus, a nail, which the bud resembles. For centuries the Moluccas were the world's only source, and the clove was a treasure of the long spice trade and later a prize fought over by the European powers. In Han-dynasty China it was known as the chicken-tongue spice, and officers of the court were required to hold cloves in the mouth to sweeten their breath before addressing the emperor.

Clove's numbing, antiseptic bite comes from eugenol, its dominant essential oil compound, whose genuine local anaesthetic and antibacterial properties are still exploited in mainstream dentistry today, where eugenol-based cements and temporary filling materials remain in professional use, one of the more solidly evidence-based traditional plant remedies recorded in this atlas. The same chemistry explains the old folk practice of holding a whole clove against an aching tooth for temporary relief, a genuine if crude use of the spice's real pharmacology rather than a purely magical one.

Whole cloves remain a common addition to warm winter drinks, mulled wine and cider among them, valued for exactly the same warm, penetrating aroma that once made the spice a treasure worth fighting empires over, a small everyday survival of a history that once reshaped the map of the East Indies.

The clove's powerful warm scent gave it a protective role in European folk practice: an orange stuck all over with cloves, the pomander, was carried against infection and evil smells, especially in time of plague, and hung in wardrobes to keep off moths and to sweeten the air, a use recorded here as folk history. In the language of correspondence the clove is a warm, protective and attracting spice, burned as incense to draw money and love and to drive away hostility and negativity, its meanings read from its heat, its penetrating fragrance and its long value as a treasure of trade. A small nail-shaped bud, the clove carries a symbolism of protection, warmth and worth.

The Dutch monopoly on cloves was even more ruthlessly enforced than that on nutmeg: for a period the Dutch East India Company deliberately destroyed clove trees on every island except Ambon to keep supply, and price, under total control, until the French administrator and botanist Pierre Poivre managed to smuggle clove seedlings out in the 1770s and establish plantations on Mauritius and Reunion, breaking the monopoly and eventually seeding the clove industry that today makes Zanzibar and nearby Pemba, off the coast of East Africa, among the world's leading producers.