When you sip a pumpkin spice latte or light up a pumpkin spice candle, you owe trees a “thank you.”
“Most of the spices come from trees,” said Spencer Campbell, Plant Clinic manager of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle.
The taste and scent combination generally referred to as “pumpkin spice,” long associated with pumpkin pies and now marketed to the point of ubiquity, is a mixture of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and often cloves or allspice.
Cinnamon comes from the inner bark of various evergreen trees in the Cinnamomum genus, native to Southeast Asia. When it dries, the bark curls up into the tubes we know as cinnamon sticks, or it can be ground to flavor baked goods and coffee drinks.
Nutmeg is the fruit of a tropical evergreen tree, Myristica fragrans, native to Indonesia. The fleshy covering of the nuts is ground up for another spice, mace.
Cloves are the dried flowers of another Indonesian tree, Syzygium aromaticum. The name comes from the French word clou, meaning “nail,” because that’s what dried whole cloves resemble. Allspice are the berries of a tree native to the Caribbean, Mexico and Central America.
“As important as trees are, other plants are involved,” Campbell said. Ginger is the rhizome, or swollen underground stem, of an Asian flowering plant (Zingiber officinale).
Sugar can come from several plants. One is sugar cane, (Saccharum officinarum), a grass from the Indian subcontinent. Another source is beets (Beta vulgaris), the roots of a plant from southern Europe that can be grown in places too cold for sugar cane, such as the upper Midwest. The sugar in many commercial products is high-fructose corn syrup from corn (Zea mays), domesticated from a grass native to southern Mexico.
Milk, of course, doesn’t come from plants at all — unless you specify soy milk in your latte. Soybeans, though widely grown in the Midwest, are native to East Asia. Almond milk comes from another tree: the almond tree (Prunus amygdalus), one of the earliest domesticated fruit trees, which originated in Central and Western Asia.
“We often forget how much our pleasures depend on plants, especially tropical plants we don’t see every day,” Campbell said. None of the trees involved in the profitable business of producing spices is in danger of extinction, but many other tropical trees are. As a leading tree museum, the Arboretum works to save threatened species of trees in Mexico, Costa Rica, Vietnam and other sites worldwide.
The traditional pumpkin pie spices got together with sugar starting in the 16th century, when new sea routes, increasing colonialization and global trade made them both cheap.
Once, spices had to be traded overland from Asia to Europe and were an expensive luxury enjoyed only by the very rich, especially as part of Christmas feasts. Sugar and spices became inexpensive enough for ordinary Europeans just as some of them settled in New England and New York, where they learned about pumpkins and other American squashes from the Indigenous peoples in North America. Pumpkin pie spice was born.
“There’s a world of people and plants in a pumpkin spice latte,” Campbell said.
For tree and plant advice, contact the Plant Clinic at The Morton Arboretum (630-719-2424, mortonarb.org/plant-clinic, or plantclinic@mortonarb.org). Beth Botts is a staff writer at the Arboretum.
