Laurelia sempervirens Seeds | Chilean Laurel

Chilean Laurel (Laurelia sempervirens) seed — Chilean Laurel (*Laurelia sempervirens*): Atherospermataceae, native to The temperate rainforest of central and southern Chile, from the Maule region south through Valdivia to Chiloe, on damp slopes and in deep river valleys.

LATIN NAME: Laurelia sempervirens

COMMON NAME: Chilean Laurel

Plant Profile

Chilean laurel is a tall evergreen, straight-trunked and dense-crowned, with opposite, glossy, oval to lance-shaped leaves that stay on the tree all year. It belongs to the cool, wet forests of southern Chile, where rainfall is heavy, summers are mild and the air stays humid, and it grows in company with the other aromatic trees of that forest, among them the winter’s bark tree.

The tree was long filed away in the Monimiaceae, and many floras and papers still carry that family name for it. Modern treatments place it in the Atherospermataceae, a small southern family whose members are aromatic trees and shrubs without close relatives in the northern temperate flora, and whose wood and bark carry the same kind of oil cells that make the group easy to identify by smell.

The flowers are small, greenish-white and inconspicuous, and they are not all alike. The species is functionally dioecious: male and female flowers are borne on separate trees, so a lone plant cannot set seed. The fruit is a small, dry, single-seeded achene carried in a cup-like receptacle, and the seed it holds is short-lived, which is why seedlings in the wild appear near the parent tree rather than far from it.

Because the bark and leaf oils are so aromatic, they have been tested as pest-control material rather than as fragrance. Extracts deterred the pea aphid in feeding choice tests and killed settled aphids when sprayed, and the leaf oil repelled the blood-feeding bug that carries Chagas disease in South America, though not as strongly as a synthetic repellent. This is screening work, not a registered product.

Science & Biotechnology

Work on the leaves found a benzylisoquinoline alkaloid, laurotetanine, as the main blood-pressure-lowering constituent of a leaf extract tested in animals, which fits the plant’s recorded use in the traditional medicine of southern Chile. The alkaloid belongs to a group well known from other aromatic trees of the southern forests, and it is the reason the leaves rather than the timber have drawn the pharmacologists.

Uses & Benefits

Hydrodistillation of the leaves and bark gives a strongly aromatic oil, and analysis has shown safrole as the leading constituent of the leaf oil, with limonene as its main companion. Bark oil follows the same pattern with safrole still dominant and methyl eugenol the second major component, alongside limonene. Safrole is the old sassafras flavouring, withdrawn from food use because of its toxicity to the liver.

Chilean laurel is not the bay laurel of the Mediterranean, and the two plants share only a name and a habit of smelling good. Bay laurel, Laurus nobilis, is a Lauraceae shrub of dry Mediterranean hillsides whose leaves are the kitchen spice; this tree is an Atherospermataceae species of wet southern forest whose leaf oil is dominated by safrole. Books that treat the names as interchangeable mislead the grower twice over.

In Chile the tree has been harvested for pale, workable timber and for its aromatic bark, and the wood has a long record in furniture and construction in the south of the country. Its value to a garden outside its homeland is chiefly ornamental: a bold evergreen for a mild, damp climate, planted where its leaf litter and its slow, upright growth can be accommodated.

Growing from Seed

Seed of this family is not built to wait, so sow it soon after the fruit loosens. Use a mix of two parts peat or leaf mould and one part coarse grit, sow on the surface and cover very lightly, then keep the pan in a humid, shaded frame with a steady temperature. Press the compost gently and water from below to avoid disturbing the seed.

Move the seedlings on at the two or three true-leaf stage into deep pots, because the young taproot resents disturbance once it has run. Grow them in light shade with plenty of humidity for the first two seasons, sheltering them from wind and hard frost, and plant out only when the stem is the thickness of a pencil. A cool, lime-free soil suits them.

Our Take

I grow this tree for the smell of the bark under a fingernail, which is worth more to me than its flowers. The name is best learned beside the plant it is confused with, the true bay laurel, and its southern-forest character sits well with the other aromatic trees of the same family, including Sassafras tzumu and the lemony Litsea cubeba.

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