Sandarac

Sandarac is the resin of Tetraclinis articulata, the sandarac tree, also called arar or Barbary thuja: the sole living species of its genus, a conifer of the cypress family that older texts placed in Thuja or Callitris. It grows wild in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, with small outlying stands on Malta and near Cartagena in Spain, at low altitudes in a hot, dry climate, and it is Malta's national tree. It is a small, slow-growing tree, often with several trunks, carrying sprays of tiny scale leaves and four-scaled cones, and is one of the few conifers that can regrow from a cut stump. The resin seeps from the stems of its own accord or from cuts in the bark and hardens in the air into small translucent chips with a faint yellow tinge; Morocco is its main source. In Renaissance Italy 'varnish' usually meant sandarac, and it is still valued for coating paintings and antiques; nineteenth-century photographers varnished their negatives and prints with it. Though only faintly aromatic, it has long been burned as incense, its scent likened to balsam. The Greeks and Romans used the word for red arsenic sulfide, and the resin meaning reached Europe from Arabic only in the early sixteenth century. Cunningham calls it gum juniper and assigns it to the Sun and the element of fire.