Anise myrtle
An Australian rainforest tree whose leaf smells overwhelmingly of anise, sold in the native-foods trade alongside lemon myrtle and infused the same way. It has moved genus twice — Backhousia, then Anetholea, now Syzygium — which is why three binomials are in circulation for one plant.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Syzygium anisatum
- Family
- Myrtaceae
- Part used
- Leaf
- Origin
- A very restricted area of subtropical rainforest in the Bellinger and Nambucca valleys of northern New South Wales, Australia
- Drunk in
- New South Wales, Australia
Character
Clean sweet anise with a green eucalyptus edge underneath and almost no bitterness — sweeter than star anise and cleaner than fennel, and it needs no sugar to be drinkable.
Notes: anise, liquorice, eucalyptus, green leaf
History
The wild population is small and geographically confined, and effectively all commercial material comes from plantations established from the 1990s as the Australian native-foods sector developed. That makes it a rare case in this catalogue of a plant whose entire trade is younger than most of the people drinking it.
How it is drunk
Used in the Australian native-foods trade as a tisane on its own and blended with lemon myrtle, and as a culinary herb in baking, syrups and cured fish. It is a modern commercial product rather than a plant with a long domestic drinking tradition, and saying otherwise would be a marketing story rather than a history.
Production
Harvested from coppiced plantation trees, dried at low temperature and usually milled. Heat costs the anise character faster than it costs anything else on the leaf, so low-temperature drying is the whole quality question and milled material ages quickly once opened.
Preparation
Infusion · Blended with tea
Herbal infusion (tisane)
1–2 g/100 ml · 90–95 °C · 4 min
Category-typical practice rather than a measurement for this specific botanical. Most infusions are far more tolerant of a long steep than tea is.
What gets confused
Three unrelated families produce this aroma and TeaHQ holds a record for each: anise (Pimpinella anisum, an umbellifer seed), star anise (Illicium verum, a Chinese fruit) and this Australian myrtle leaf. They share a dominant aroma compound and nothing else, and they are not interchangeable by weight or by method.
Common mistakes
- Buying pre-milled and keeping it. Ground leaf loses the anise within months.
Evidence for this page
This page is TeaHQ synthesis throughout. No external source stands behind any statement on it, including the botanical name. 132 of the 204 botanicals have had their names and distribution checked against a taxonomic authority and this is not one of them.
Brewing parameters here are typical practice for the category rather than measurements of this plant, and each set says so.
This page makes no safety claim. It describes what Anise myrtle is, where it comes from and how it is prepared — not what it does to a person. The absence of a safety note here is not a statement that the plant is safe. How TeaHQ handles this.