One of my deam goals is to bonsai a Clove tree, Syzygium aromaticum. It would be so wonderful to have a tiny fragment tree to warm my house. Unfortunately, the seeds don’t take when they dry and I can’t, for the life of me, find a place that sells saplings. Does anyone happen to know a place I could get one?
Clove is Syzygium aromaticum, a tropical evergreen from the Maluku Islands in Indonesia. It’s not something you plant out in the Midwest: it’s frost-tender and wants warm, humid, tropical conditions, so outdoors it dies at the first freeze.
The workable route is a container plant that lives outside in summer and comes indoors (or into a heated greenhouse) for the cold months. Buy it as a live plant, not seed. Clove seed loses viability quickly and germinates poorly, so viable seed is basically not a thing you can buy.
Specialty tropical mail-order nurseries are where these come from (Logee’s in Connecticut and Top Tropicals in Florida are the long-standing names), plus the odd Etsy seller. Expect a small, slow seedling: it needs years of high light and humidity before it would ever flower, and the clove you actually harvest is the unopened flower bud. So: keepable as a houseplant or greenhouse curiosity, not a Midwest harvest crop.
(Source on the plant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clove)