Clove Gardens

The middle slopes of Tidore are still covered in clove plantations, and during the harvest in August and September the smell of drying buds is everywhere — sharp, sweet, instantly recognisable. Most travellers see the gardens only from a passing bemo, but the trail up to Gurabunga winds through several smallholdings and it is worth stopping to look at the trees and, if the season is right, the harvested buds spread out on tarpaulins to dry.

The grower families are usually happy for visitors to wander through their gardens; a small purchase of fresh cloves at the end is the polite thing to do. Tidore cloves are larger and more aromatic than those produced elsewhere in Indonesia today, and a few ounces sealed in a jar travels well as a souvenir. The harvest is also the busiest social season on the island and a good time to visit if you want to see Tidore at its liveliest.

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A story
Cloves are the dried flower buds of Syzygium aromaticum, a tree native only to a handful of islands in North Maluku — Ternate, Tidore, Moti, Makian, and Bacan. For nearly two thousand years, until the Dutch broke the monopoly by planting cloves on Ambon and later in Zanzibar, these few islands were the only source of one of the most valuable commodities in the world. A single shipload of cloves was worth more than a Spanish galleon.