Plant · P-646

Allspice

Pimenta dioica

Allspice is a lowland tropical tree whose dried, unripe berries taste like nutmeg, clove and cinnamon in one fruit - which is exactly where the English name comes from - and go into everything from pickles and ketchup to Benedictine and Chartreuse. Its leaves and a separate leaf oil flavour baked goods and perfumes, and the wood is fine-textured, hard and heavy. It is slow to bear, with a seedling tree taking around twenty years to flower and full production not arriving for two to three decades, though a tree can then keep cropping for about fifty years. Unusually for a spice tree it does best on limestone soil, and since it may need separate male and female trees to fruit at all, that question is worth settling before a single tree goes in the ground.