Cinnamomum verum

This is real cinnamon, the one from Sri Lanka: pale quills, thin and brittle, with a fine sweet aroma. What is sold as cinnamon almost everywhere else is its cousin cassia, thick and hard and coarser in flavor; nobody who tries both goes back. The spice is the tree's inner bark, which is lifted, dried, and curls itself into quills as it dries. And you don't have to wait for a big tree: cinnamon is grown as a low bush, cut back again and again.

Warmth and rain spread through the year: around 27°C and 2,000 to 2,500 mm annually, with no long dry season. It gives its best bark below 500 meters, though the tree will grow to 2,000. It wants well-drained soil and grows slowly. The management is what matters: at 3 or 4 years it's cut to the ground so the stool throws several straight shoots, and those shoots are peeled at 2 years old. From then on you cut in rotation, a permanent coppice. Plant 5–10 m apart as a tree, closer if you'll manage it as a bush.

The bark is the familiar spice: sweets, rice dishes, curries, coffee, chocolate. The fresh leaf also perfumes the pot and gives a greener cinnamon flavor, very good in stews. The tree also yields essential oil, from leaf and from bark, which industry uses in baking, pickles and soft drinks.

Bark oil is used in dental and pharmaceutical preparations, and cinnamon has a very long tradition as a digestive: in Asia it is still an everyday remedy for an unsettled stomach.

A food species of the medium stratum with a secondary life cycle, and one of the most rewarding in a syntropic system precisely because it is managed by cutting: every cut gives bark, leaf and biomass for the soil, and the stool regrows. It's a partial-shade plant, so it lives happily beneath the tall trees. It starts producing at 4 or 5 years and carries on for 20 or 30.