Herb
Unopened flower buds from a handful of islands — heat, numbness and old empires.
These are associations the community holds, not settled fact — the more a reading is shared, the bolder it sits.
A clove is a flower bud picked before it opens and dried until it is hard as a nail — which is exactly what the name means, from the French clou. For most of recorded history every clove in the world came from five small volcanic islands in Maluku, and the Dutch East India Company's attempt to enforce that monopoly by destroying trees elsewhere is one of the ugliest chapters in the history of spice.
Cloves reached Rome and Han China; a clove has been found in a Mesopotamian kitchen jar, which if the dating holds means the trade is astonishingly old. Their most familiar domestic form is the pomander, an orange studded with cloves, hung in a wardrobe or carried against bad air.
Craft use is protection, stopping gossip, and drawing money. Cloves burnt for cleansing and pressed into candles for prosperity are both common; the gossip-stopping working, in which cloves are named for the talkers, is widespread in Latin American and Caribbean folk practice and has been picked up broadly. Their genuinely numbing quality gave them a long career in dentistry, which is not the same as saying it should be relied on.
Readings practitioners have offered, ordered by how many recognise them. Take what serves, leave the rest.
Carried forward
Common in contemporary practice
Cloves named for the people talking and then burnt, to stop gossip. The working is widespread in Latin American and Caribbean folk magic and has been adopted broadly; where you meet it, it is worth knowing whose it was first.
Carried forward
European household practice, medieval onward
The pomander — an orange stuck all over with cloves, dried and hung — was carried against bad air and later kept simply for the smell. It is the ancestor of every clove-and-orange thing sold at a Christmas market.
Credit what you carry. Much of this comes from living traditions, and some of it from traditions that are closed — held by particular peoples and not offered for general use. Where you know whose practice a reading came from, name them; where you don't, say that too.