Stevie Raines, age 11, of Asheville, No. Carolina, for his question:
Does frankincense grow?
For countless ages, people have burned incense to add a subtle sweet fragrance to their temples and churches. In almost all civili¬zations, the smoky smell of incense is linked to holy places, to prayers and peaceful meditations. In Bible days, this frankincense also was linked to funerals and burial of the dead.
Frankincense is resin from certain trees prepared to burn with a soft, sweet, lingering scent. The "frank" part of the word means "pure" or "true." It was added long ago to distinguish genuine incense from less fragrant imitations. However, genuine incense comes from several related trees and experts claim that there are slight variations in the scents of their resins.
Incense trees belong in the Geraniales group of tropical trees and shrubs. Also in this group are the trees that yield cashew and pistachio nuts. The five most popular incense trees are classed in the genus Boswellia, of the family Burseraceae.
They are sizeable tropical evergreens with dark foliage that resembles extra thick rosebush leaves. They bear little greenish blossoms and clusters of small fruits. But their fragrant secret is inside their gummy resins.
These incense trees are pretty choosy about where they will grow, which is why incense comes from only a few parts of the world. One species is at home in the mountainous regions of central India, two thrive in east Africa and another in Abyssinia. It is thought that these or other species may be found in parts of China. These eastern regions produced incense in ancient days, when the precious resins were toted hundreds of miles by ships and camels.
The sap of the average incense tree is a pale milky juice and the trick is to let it dry to form glassy resin. Harvesting begins with the sunny days of May and lasts until September brings the first showers of the rainy season. A deep cut is made down the trunk and below it a five inch wide strip of the bark is removed. Naturally the tree oozes out its gummy resin to heal the wound.
When the milky juice comes in contact with the air, it dries hard and forms the resinous gum. This takes about three months. Meantime, the cut in the trunk is made deeper, so that more sap oozes forth. In time, the seeping resin sets in glassy globules, which are gathered to make second grade frankincense.
Often the glassy globules are packed into goat skins and camels tote them to market just as they did in days of old. In the trade, incense is known as olibanum and the busy markets of Asia rate it among their most precious spices.
Incense is grown and donated by only a few trees of the plant world. So far we have no good chemical imitation, so the price is high. People have tried to find native trees that yield olibanum type resins. Some say that the Norway pine yields a fair imitation, but nobody claims that it has quite the same lingering fragrance as genuine frankincense.