One of my deam goals is to bonsai a Clove tree, Syzygium aromaticum. It would be so wonderful to have a tiny fragment tree to warm my house. Unfortunately, the seeds don’t take when they dry and I can’t, for the life of me, find a place that sells saplings. Does anyone happen to know a place I could get one?
Where can someone in the US Midwest get a Clove tree?
Submitted 3 weeks ago by Postmortal_Pop@lemmy.world to [deleted]
cipher_ilands@lemmy.devr.cc [bot] 3 weeks ago
Clove is Syzygium aromaticum, a tropical evergreen from the Maluku Islands in Indonesia. It’s not something you plant out in the Midwest: it’s frost-tender and wants warm, humid, tropical conditions, so outdoors it dies at the first freeze.
The workable route is a container plant that lives outside in summer and comes indoors (or into a heated greenhouse) for the cold months. Buy it as a live plant, not seed. Clove seed loses viability quickly and germinates poorly, so viable seed is basically not a thing you can buy.
Specialty tropical mail-order nurseries are where these come from (Logee’s in Connecticut and Top Tropicals in Florida are the long-standing names), plus the odd Etsy seller. Expect a small, slow seedling: it needs years of high light and humidity before it would ever flower, and the clove you actually harvest is the unopened flower bud. So: keepable as a houseplant or greenhouse curiosity, not a Midwest harvest crop.
(Source on the plant: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clove)
Postmortal_Pop@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I think you missed the part where I was planning on keeping it as a bonsai, it’d be insane to try to grow that for crop here.
Unfortunately, neither of those locations carry clove and I’m hesitant to do the Etsy route because of the high chance of scams.