The many uses of cloves
The idea is simple. Pick something, dry it, and use it later. Not really very long ago, that was preservation. The clove flower was no exception and to this day, picking and drying is how it goes.
The clove in your cupboard is the dried flower bud from the tropical Clove evergreen native to the Spice Islands. It is highly fragrant and grows up to 50 feet tall. Harvesting trees are kept to about 30 feet. “In the days of sea travel by the great shipping line,” Toussaint-Samat writes, setting the scene of great passenger ships and the “wonderful scent of cloves, telling them they were approaching the island even while they were still far out to sea.”
Cloves are picked when mature but before the yellow petals of the flower 
open. They are dried in the sun and will lose 66% of their weight in the drying.
Tanzania and Indonesia produce the vast quantity of cloves, with Tanzania producing nearly 80% of the world’s cloves.