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Planting
Days to maturity
Seasonal yields
Sow indoors · Direct sow · Transplant outdoors
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Plant · P-665
Pandan
Pandanus amaryllifolius
Pandan is a clumping tropical screwpine grown for a leaf so fragrant it carries the same basmati aroma compound at twenty times the concentration of basmati rice itself, giving it the strongest scent recorded in any plant. Fresh or dried leaves flavour and colour rice, cassava and sweet dishes, wrap rice dumplings for cooking, and can be harvested continuously for years by stripping the lower leaves and leaving the growing tip. It is one of the few strongly aromatic culinary herbs that genuinely tolerates shade, so it fits well as an understorey planting beneath taller trees, and because every plant in cultivation is a seedless clone propagated from suckers, it spreads only as a slowly widening clump and can never escape into wild ground on its own.
Record at a glance
Growing profile
- Sun
- Full Sun · Partial Sun · Shade
- USDA zone
- USDA 9–11
- Soil
- Sand · Loam · Clay
- Moisture
- Well-Drained · Moist
Vertical layer
Shrub- Soil pH
- 5.5–7.5
- Plant type
- Evergreen Tree
- Mature height
- 3.3–9.8 ft
- Mature spread
- 3–9.8 ft
- Plant spacing
- 4.9 ft
- Root type
- Fibrous-shallow
- Spread pattern
- Root
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The deeper layer
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- Primary
- Locked ecological function
- Secondary
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- Byproduct
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Behind the record
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