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Ceratonia siliqua, commonly known as the carob tree, St John's-bread, or locust bean (not to be confused with the African locust bean) is a species of flowering evergreen shrub or tree in the pea family, Fabaceae. It is widely cultivated for its edible pods, and as an ornamental tree in gardens. The ripe, dried pod is often ground to carob powder, which is used to replace cocoa powder. Carob bars, an alternative to chocolate bars, are often available in health-food stores.
The carob tree is native to the Mediterranean region, including Southern Europe, Northern Africa, the larger Mediterranean islands, the Levant and Middle-East of Western Asia into Iran; and the Canary Islands and Macaronesia.The carat, a unit of mass for gemstones, and of purity for gold, takes its name, indirectly, from the Greek word for a carob seed, kerátion.
The Ceratonia siliqua tree grows up to 15 m (49 ft) tall. The crown is broad and semispherical, supported by a thick trunk with brown rough bark and sturdy branches. Leaves are 10 to 20 cm (3.9 to 7.9 in) long, alternate, pinnate, and may or may not have a terminal leaflet. It is frost-tolerant to roughly 20 °F.
Most carob trees are dioecious, some are hermaphrodite. The male trees do not produce fruit.The trees blossom in autumn. The flowers are small and numerous, spirally arranged along the inflorescence axis in catkin-like racemes borne on spurs from old wood and even on the trunk (cauliflory); they are pollinated by both wind and insects.
The fruit is a legume (also known less accurately as a pod), that can be elongated, compressed, straight, or curved, and thickened at the sutures. The pods take a full year to develop and ripen. The sweet ripe pods eventually fall to the ground and are eaten by various mammals[which?], thereby dispersing the hard seed. The seeds contain leucodelphinidin, a colourless chemical compound.
Although used extensively for agriculture, carob can still be found growing wild in eastern Mediterranean regions, and has become naturalized in the west.
The tree is typical in the southern Portuguese region of the Algarve, where it has the name alfarrobeira (for the tree), and alfarroba (for the fruit), as well as in southern Spain (Spanish: algarrobo, algarroba), Catalonia and Valencia (Catalan: garrofer, garrofa), Malta (Maltese: Ħarruba), on the Italian islands of Sicily and Sardinia (Italian: carrubo, carruba), Croatian islands near Split (Croatian: Rogač), and in Southern Greece, Cyprus, as well as on many Greek islands such as Crete and Samos. The common Greek name is (Greek: χαρουπιά, charoupia), or (Greek: ξυλοκερατιά, ksilokeratia), meaning "wooden horn".
In Turkey, it is known as keçiboynuzu, meaning "goat's horn".The various trees known as algarrobo in Latin America (Albizia saman in Cuba and four species of Prosopis in Argentina and Paraguay) belong to a different subfamily, Mimosoideae.
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