The most famous tree in the Maluku Islands of Indonesia stands off a little road that turns up the flank of the Gamalama Volcano, rising high in a hot, humid, and aromatic wood of clove and nutmeg. Amidst the other greenery that blankets the island of Ternate, this giant clove, knotted and gnarled, is famous for sprouting hundreds of kilos of fragrant leaves and fruit, as it has done for nearly four hundred years.

The tree has a local and personal name, Afo, simply understood as “the giant.” It is famed not only for its size and generous productivity, but because it is a living sign of survival and defiance: a tree that at one time would have been cut down and burned if its existence had been known. Afo stands over a history that took the lives of many islanders – and other trees – across the centuries.