Sweet Pittosporum

Sweet pittosporum earned its common name from the honeyed, orange-blossom scent its flowers release each spring, a fragrance early Australian settlers prized enough to plant the tree near homesteads and along garden paths. Its fine, pale timber became known as cheesewood because it was once cut into blocks for wood engraving and shaped into boxes and skewers used in cheese making. Aboriginal communities within its native range recognized it as a distinct feature of the wet forest understory long before European settlement, though it was not widely recorded as a plant taken internally as food or medicine. Today its story is a mixed one: cherished as a fragrant garden tree at home in Australia, but watched carefully as a fast-spreading newcomer in the many warm, humid places it has since traveled to.