Mace (spice) in the context of "Spice"

Grenada is an island country of the West Indies in the eastern Caribbean Sea. The southernmost of the Windward Islands, Grenada is directly south of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and about 100 miles (160 km) north of Trinidad and the South American mainland.

Grenada consists of the island of Grenada itself, two smaller islands, Carriacou and Petite Martinique, and several small islands which lie to the north of the main island and are a part of the Grenadines. Its size is 344 square kilometres (133 sq mi), with an estimated population of 114,621 in 2024. Its capital is St. George's. Grenada is also known as the "Island of Spice" due to its production of nutmeg and mace crops.

Botany, also called phytology or plant science, is the branch of natural science and biology that studies plants, especially their anatomy, taxonomy, and ecology. A botanist or plant scientist is a scientist who specialises in this field. "Plant" and "botany" may be defined more narrowly to include only land plants and their study, which is also known as phytology. Phytologists or botanists (in the strict sense) study approximately 410,000 species of land plants, including some 391,000 species of vascular plants (of which approximately 369,000 are flowering plants) and approximately 20,000 bryophytes.

Botany originated as prehistoric herbalism to identify and later cultivate plants that were edible, poisonous, and medicinal, making it one of the first endeavours of human investigation. Medieval physic gardens, often attached to monasteries, contained plants that possibly had medicinal benefits. They were forerunners of the first botanical gardens attached to universities, founded from the 1540s onwards. One of the earliest was the Padua botanical garden. These gardens facilitated the academic study of plants. Efforts to catalogue and describe their collections were the beginnings of plant taxonomy and led in 1753 to the binomial system of nomenclature of Carl Linnaeus that remains in use to this day for the naming of all biological species.

Myristica fragrans, commonly known as the nutmeg tree, is an evergreen species indigenous to the Maluku Islands of Indonesia. This aromatic tree is economically significant as the primary source of two distinct spices: nutmeg, derived from its seed, and mace, obtained from the seed's aril.

Valued for centuries in global spice trade, M. fragrans is now widely cultivated throughout tropical regions, including parts of Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia), South Asia (Kerala in India, Sri Lanka), East Asia (Guangdong and Yunnan in China, Taiwan), the Caribbean (notably Grenada), and South America.

An aril (/ˈærɪl/), also called arillus (plural arilli), is a specialized outgrowth from a seed that partly or completely covers the seed. An arillode, or false aril, is sometimes distinguished: whereas an aril grows from the attachment point of the seed to the ovary (from the funiculus or hilum), an arillode forms from a different point on the seed coat. The term "aril" is sometimes applied to any fleshy appendage of the seed in flowering plants, such as the mace of the nutmeg seed. Arils and arillodes are often edible enticements that encourage animals to transport the seed, thereby assisting in seed dispersal. Pseudarils are aril-like structures commonly found on the pyrenes of Burseraceae species that develop from the mesocarp of the ovary. The fleshy, edible pericarp splits neatly in two halves, then falling away or being eaten to reveal a brightly coloured pseudaril around the black seed.

The aril may create a fruit-like structure, called (among other names) a false fruit. False fruit are found in numerous Angiosperm taxa. The edible false fruit of the longan, lychee and ackee fruits are highly developed arils surrounding the seed rather than a pericarp layer. Such arils are also found in a few species of gymnosperms, notably the yews and related conifers such as the lleuque and the kahikatea. Instead of the woody cone typical of most gymnosperms, the reproductive structure of the yew consists of a single seed that becomes surrounded by a fleshy, cup-like covering. This covering is derived from a highly modified cone scale.

Myristica is a genus of trees in the family Myristicaceae. There are over 150 species, distributed in Asia and the western Pacific as far as Vanuatu.

The type species of the genus, and the most economically important member, is Myristica fragrans (the nutmeg tree), from which mace is also derived.

The Banda Islands (Indonesian: Kepulauan Banda) are a volcanic group of ten small islands in the Banda Sea, about 140 km (87 mi) south of Seram Island and about 2,000 km (1,243 mi) east of Java, and constitute an administrative district (kecamatan) within the Central Maluku Regency in the Indonesian province of Maluku. The islands rise out of 4-to-6-kilometre (2.5 to 3.7 mi) deep ocean and have a total land area of approximately 172 square kilometres (66 sq mi); with associated maritime area this reaches 736.3 square kilometres (284.3 sq mi). They had a population of 18,544 at the 2010 Census and 20,924 at the 2020 Census; the official estimate as of mid-2023 was 21,902. Until the mid-19th century the Banda Islands were the world's only source of the spices nutmeg and mace, produced from the nutmeg tree. The islands are also popular destinations for scuba diving and snorkeling. The main town and administrative centre is Banda Neira, located on the island of the same name.