Myrtaceae
Syzygium aromaticum
Clove
- Part used
- flower
- Native range
- The Maluku Islands of Indonesia — originally just five small islands
- Morphology
- An evergreen tree to twenty metres. The spice is the unopened flower bud, picked green and dried to a hard brown nail — which is what the name means, from the Latin clavus.
- Also known as
- Eugenia caryophyllata
What is in it
Evidence
Eugenol is a genuine local anaesthetic and antiseptic with real evidence, and is used in dentistry — zinc oxide eugenol is a standard dental cement and temporary filling material.
Safety
Culinary use is benign. Clove oil is hazardous: ingestion causes severe liver injury in children, and cases of fulminant hepatic failure from small quantities are documented. Undiluted oil applied to gums causes tissue damage. Eugenol has anticoagulant activity.
Interactions: Additive bleeding risk with anticoagulants at high intake
Regulatory: Permitted as a food. Clove oil is a registered dental active; child-resistant packaging applies.
How the traditions classify it
Three systems, rating the same plant. Where they disagree, none of them is correcting the others — they are separate frameworks that arrived at their categories independently.
Historical use
Traded from the Malukus into China, India and the Mediterranean for two thousand years, and among the spices the Portuguese and Dutch fought wars over. The Dutch East India Company destroyed clove trees outside its controlled islands to hold the monopoly. Clove oil for toothache is recorded across many traditions and is still in dental use.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.
Worth knowing
Clove is the traditional remedy most likely still to be sitting in a dentist's surgery. Zinc oxide eugenol has been a standard dental cement for over a century, and eugenol is a genuine local anaesthetic — the folk use for toothache was correct.
The spice trade history is unusually stark even by the standards of this collection. Cloves grew on five small islands in the Malukus and nowhere else. The Dutch East India Company enforced its monopoly by destroying every clove tree outside the islands it controlled, and killed a great many people doing it. The spice is now grown across the tropics because a French administrator, Pierre Poivre, smuggled seedlings out in the 1770s.
And the oil is dangerous in a specific and unexpected way: small ingested quantities have caused fulminant liver failure in children.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.