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On 30 September 1748, the Compagnie des Indes (French East India Company) instructed Pierre Poivre (1719-1786) to travel to Manila with the aim of acquiring and acclimatising in the Isle de France the clove and nutmeg trees cultivated by the VOC (Dutch East India Company) in its colonies in the Molucca Islands. On 1 October 1755, Pierre Poivre submitted a handwritten description of a young nutmeg tree he had brought back from Timor to the Conseil supérieur de l’Isle de France. Jean-Baptiste-Christophe Fusée-Aublet (1723-1778), the official apothecary of the Compagnie des Indes, contested this report, claiming instead that the so-called nutmeg tree was in fact an areca palm. In this paper, we first identify the social and relational factors that shaped the discourses of this botanical controversy, looking for their origins in the personal papers of Fusée-Aublet and Poivre. Second, we observe the discourses of identification of the nutmeg trees and the will to elaborate the argumentation on a scientific, legal and polemical level. By analysing the conspiracy narrative deployed by Poivre about Fusée-Aublet and other personalities of the Compagnie des Indes, we try to understand the epistemic regime underlying the rhetorical discourse of this botanical controversy.