Native to Indonesia, they are dried flower buds of an evergreen tree. They can be used in both sweet and savory dishes and are often found in Asian, Indian and African cooking. Apparently, cloves have a numbing effect to the mouth. Clove cigarettes were outlawed in the States in 2009.
Bizarrely, Zanzibar is the world's largest producer of cloves. It also turns out that Zanzibar is an island. Nuts! (or should that be Cloves!)
A clove of garlic is not the same as clove. Also, don't google cloves of garlic...things get weird...
