Plant · P-642

Cinnamon Ceylon

Cinnamomum verum

Cinnamon is a wet-tropics evergreen tree that is almost never grown to its full 18 m height - instead it is cut back hard once established and kept as a coppiced bush, since the crop is the inner bark peeled from young shoots during the rains. That bark flavours curries and sweets and yields two distinct essential oils, one from the bark for food flavouring and incense and a cheaper one from the leaves used in soap and insecticide. It needs constant warmth and heavy year-round rainfall with no real dry season, and is frost-tender with no cold tolerance at all, so anywhere winters bring freezing weather it has to be grown under cover. The two-year cutting cycle that produces the bark also throws off a steady supply of leaf and chip material for mulch.