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.