Cinnamomum septentrionale Seeds | Northern Cinnamon

Northern Cinnamon (Cinnamomum septentrionale) with glossy lance-shaped leaves on a young evergreen tree — Northern Cinnamon (*Cinnamomum septentrionale*): Lauraceae, a Chinese oil laurel of the warmer mountains.

LATIN NAME: Cinnamomum septentrionale

COMMON NAME: Northern Cinnamon

Plant Profile

The Northern Cinnamon is a tall evergreen tree of the laurel family from the mountain forests of southern and southwestern China, where it grows into a straight, full-crowned tree of ten to twenty metres. The leaves are glossy, lance-shaped and strongly three-veined, and a crushed leaf gives a sharp, resinous, camphor-cinnamon smell that is distinct from the sweet bark note of the true spice trees. Small greenish flowers open in modest panicles in late spring, and dark, ovoid fruits follow in autumn, taken by thrushes and other birds.

In its home provinces it grows on warm, moist slopes with oaks and other broadleaved evergreens, and it has been planted around villages and along streams for its foliage oil and its shade. It is the hardiest of the cinnamon-laurels in wide cultivation, which is what its name records.

Science & Biotechnology

It is a foliage-oil tree rather than a bark tree, and that distinction matters: the leaves and small twigs are the distillation material, with an essential-oil chemistry based on camphor and terpenoid compounds rather than the cinnamaldehyde of the commercial spice barks, and Chinese surveys of lauraceas oil chemistry have included it in that frame. One point needs clearing up because reference lists routinely blur it: the drug Rou Gui and the commercial cassia of the world trade come from Cinnamomum cassia, and the eugenol-rich leaf oil used in flavouring comes from Ceylon cinnamon, not from this northern species, whose oil profile is a different thing entirely. Botanically it sits among the Chinese evergreen lauraceas whose species limits have been revised with herbarium and molecular work.

Forestry literature records it as a component of the subtropical evergreen broadleaved forest, a habitat type now much fragmented across its range.

Uses & Benefits

In the garden it is the cinnamon-laurel for the cooler end of the warm-temperate range: a dense, glossy, aromatic evergreen that stands light frost where its spice-tree cousins would be cut down, and that gives shade, crushed-leaf scent and bird food in one tree. In China it is planted as a wayside and courtyard tree in exactly that role.

The foliage can be harvested for small-scale distillation or simply enjoyed for its smell, and the wood has regional craft uses. It is a shade and scent tree first, and its value in cultivation rests on that.

Growing from Seed

Clean the pulp from ripe fruit and sow the fresh seed at once into a deep, humus-rich, free-draining mix, holding it at 20 to 25 °C with even moisture; viability drops within weeks, so late sowing is wasted sowing. Germination follows in four to six weeks. Shade the young plants from hot sun in their first summer.

Pot on as the root run deepens and plant out into deep, moist, well-drained soil in sun or light shade, spacing for the eventual twenty-metre crown, in a climate where winters stay mild. Water through the first two summers, mulch annually, and after establishment the tree manages itself.

Our Take

The hardiest of the cinnamon-laurels: glossy, camphor-scented and shade-giving, and clearly not the spice tree the market names suggest. An aromatic evergreen for mild-winter gardens.

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