Wisteria Enfleurage

Wisteria is one of my favourite plants. In all season, it has grace and character. The delicate, fragrant and decorative racemes of purple flowers in the spring against the grey branches, followed by copious green and shade-giving foliage it the summertime, changing leaves in the autumn, and even in the winter, when it's dormant, it manages to keep its beauty with the sparse grey branches and trunk that curl around whatever it's climbing on.

I planted my wisteria in the summer, to give shade to my eastern window, which is bringing in too much heat in the summer months into the Pilates studio (and there are plenty of those where I am now). In the winter, when it's barren, it will allow the gentle winter sunrays to get through the east window and bring light and warmth to the room.

I was thrilled when the first clusters of buds started showing - but soon enough, there were nasty black beetles with white dots, the same ones that munched away at my roses last year - literally feasting on this and wrecking havoc! To top that damage off, a couple of days of dry east wind, and most of the flowers were gone. I was able to set up about two recharges of enfleurage trays, and it looked promising, but then turned kinda sour and musty smelling. My only consolation is that next year there will be more. And also there is still an abundance of sweet pea flowers to enfleurage, as well as broom. So I will have lots fo sweet smells to play with very soon. Not all is lost!

Wisteria (Wisteria sinensis) belongs to the Fabaceae/Leguminosae family, and has flowers like all the other legumes, resembling butterflies and often fragrant, and even edible. Please note that wisteria contains a toxic glycoside in all parts to he plant - wisterin. It will causes all fun digestive nightmares, such as nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and stomach ache. So don't eat it and make sure children don't get tempted to taste it!
The flowers are often purple (though white varieties also exist), with a yellow and white "landing strip" for guiding the insects to the reproductive organs.

As for the scent itself, it is hard to describe, and in my opinion also not exactly as distinctive as, say, sweet pea. I find  the one growing this year at my garden it to be extremely similar to ylang ylang, with pronounced clove-like scent. It has a lovely creaminess, however I am lost for words describing exactly what is special about it. I remember the ones growing in Vancouver as having a soft-focus personality, more powdery yet also heady. I do not recall them being so clove-like at all. Bo Jensen describes the wisteria scent being "a pleasant, mild, warm and creamy sweetness with rosy, peppery and spicy nuances", and cites Joulain et al. research with the key molecules as being beta-chromenes 7-hydroxy-6-methoxy-4H-1-benzopyran and 6,7-dimethoxy-4H-1-benzopyran, as well as 3-hydroxy-4-phenyl-2-butanone or phenylacetoin.

Poucher's one and only formula for Glycine, No. 1086 (Wistaria) from the rather archaic 1959  edition is spelled with an "a" instead of "e" and includes:
180 Hawthorn, Synthetic
50 Eugenol
100 Methyl iphone
100 Hydroxy citronallal 
70 Ylang oil, Bourbon
80 Rose centifolia, synthetic
190 Jasmine, synthetic
100 Terpineol
40 Coumarin
60 Heliotropin
30 Musk ketone
--------
1000


Here you see my post-enfleurage flowers of both sweet peat and wisteria. In other words: Trash. I have not only the best smelling garbage but also the best looking!

Next year is a blank slate... And I hope I get a better, more robust and abundant harvest, and also that it wouldn't turn on the tray. In the meantime, I'm actually feeling inspired to try and recreate it myself with my current arsenal of extraits from enfleurage. Wish me luck...

Sweetpea Enfleurage

This spring has been unusually cold and rainy, which meant longer sweetpea flower season. Despite many delays between rain showers, waiting for the flowers to dry, I was able to collect impressive numbers of flowers for several recharges of the enfleurage tray. I think this is by far the strongest enfleurage I've been able to make. I am waiting for some more flowers to dry tomorrow and collect some more flowers for another couple (or more) of recharges before I move this into the alcohol extraction phase. 

Although the fresh sweetpea flowers hav ea very delicate and slightly lemony notes, the recharged enfleurage brings forward some more almonds notes. I think it will be really delicious. 

Meanwhile, I have been able to make a very meagre amount of wisteria flowers blossoms, because the nasty beetles have eaten most of them. And I didn't have that many clusters to begin with. I'm afraid this was not a successful harvest - but it's the first season for this vine (I only planted it a few months ago). So next year will be better. 

With my enfleurage skills slowly picking up, I am sure I will be able to make broom enfleurage this year. Although it's just another one of the same family as sweetpea, spiny broom and wisteria - each has a different aroma and its own value as a perfume material. The spiny broom was super frustrating as something always went wrong and it is very about intense (and painful) to pick it. After I tried the second time and finding tiny bug droppings everywhere, I decided to give up on that botanical, at least for the time being. Way too much work and very little results. Really looking forward to work with the other fabaceae enfleurage results and composing with them though! 

Playing in the Orchard

Despite the cold and stormy days (hail, thunderstorms and loads of rain) - Spring is here very early if to judge by the wonderful bridal gowns the almond trees are wearing, and the scent of citrus blossoms emanating from my tiny organic orchard. The copious amounts of blossoms on my organic pink grapefruit tree has been quite staggering, so I did not feel one bit guilty thinning them out and experimenting with them.


Naturally, I was curious about using the vegan enfleurage technique on them. I'm afraid the results were not particularly impressive. The flowers seemed to have "cooled down" too much in the solid fats and keep the scent to themselves, releasing only the cool and clean notes rather than opening up and releasing their more honeyed and fruity-sweet notes of methyl anthranilate.

So I kept playing with them, and layered Darjeeling black tea with organic Grapefruit Blossoms. The result here was much better, with the tea allowing them more space to breathe than the fat. I did several charges of the blossom layering. The finished result turned out magnificently springy, astringent and complementary to the floral qualities of the Darjeeling tea.

Last but not least, I tried my hand with resin enfleurage of Boswellia dalizielii. I have to see how this will play once burnt, but the resins definitely absorb the fragrance beautifully.

Narcissus Enfleurage, Part II

Yipee! Lucky for me, despite the low numbers of blooming narcissus bulbs in my garden this year, the resultant enfleurage from my meagre one-charge-batch is highly fragrant and gorgeous!
If you can imagine me doing a happy dance, this is exactly my reaction to this surprising success. It takes a long time to grow, pick and enfleurage the flowers. And then the fat needs to be soaked in alcohol and left to macerate for several weeks. Today I've finally strained it. The result is a filtered extrait (the term for the enfleurage fragrant tincture, before removal of the alcohol to produce an absolute - a stage I decided to forego due to my low yield and technical limitation), which I promptly added to Narkiss perfume, adding another layer of authentic narcissus to the absolute from Narcisse de Montainges from France that is already in there.

Spiny Broom Enfleurage Experiment

The spiny broom has been early to rise this year, creating yet another challenge in realizing my dream to extract it. It is still cold, rainy and I can't for the life of me figure out when is the best time to harvest this thorn. I did one harvest, and discovered yet again that the scent is too faint, perhaps the flowers are also a bit too old and worn-out. The ones I picked which were fragrant lost their odour by the time I got to the studio to place them in the fats for enfleurage extraction. It is becoming rapidly more evident to me that knowledge of the exact harvest time is key to success in enfleurage. I did a small trial, but the scent did not stick around at all. Considering the painstaking process and how much pain is involved (if you're not careful and get stung by the thorns it literally hurts) - I think it would rather wait till later in the spring when the non-spiny (read: thornless) broom is in bloom. Wish me luck please!

Narcissus Enfleurage

My narcissi finally bloomed but there are very few of them (still better than last year, when there were non!).
Here is a handful of pics to show you the process of my single-charge Narcissus tazetta (Chinese Sacred Lily) vegan enfleurage process. Wish me luck!

Enfleurage Experiments

This spring, I have been experimenting with vegan enfleurage (the traditional enfleurage uses animal fats - ideally a combination of lard and tallow; which as a vegetarian I'm not interested in using). I tried different vegan fats (oils that are solid at room temperature), which I slabbed on a stainless steel pan with a lid (the kind you'd use, steeped in a hot batch, in catering carts to keep the food warm). I smeared both the lid and the tray with fat, so that the flowers get encapsulated by the scent-absorbging fats, an you can truly capture some of the "headspace" of the perfume. After all, this is what enfleurage is all about!

I tried different fats - such as palm, shea butter, coconut oil, etc. with varying results and also different challenges in the process, which I feel compelled to share here in case you want to experiment with your own enfleurage with your flowers.

I tried many different flowers - whatever was in bloom. My first fantasy was to use the Calicotome villosa flowers (they look very similar to gorse flowers), but they bloomed very early and I didn't have my tray then yet. Then I was hoping to get the broom; but I could not figure out yet what is the best time of the day to pick them. This was a crucial detail, because I don't have them growing close by, and didn't want them to spoil on the way to the tray. A technical difficulty that I could not anticipate was that the fats melt very fast if you take the tray out with you to harvest. And then you end up with some serious problems (such as the fats on the lid drip off to the bottom).  And that is defeating the whole purpose...

So, in the end, I created mixed trays of flowers, whatever I had on hand that was blooming, and paid close attention to the time of the day when it's best to capture them. Some are best early in the morning (not too many, actually), others you'll need to wait till the sun is shining (late morning). The Trachelospermum jasminoides flowers give their very best incensed-ambery-jasmine in the afternoon. And some, like the gardenias and Brunflesia, truly are best at night. The sweetpeas and Buddleijas davidii are most forgiving. But all are also favoured by tiny, minuscule bugs, which I found some ways to reduce, but very few ways to completely avoid completely.



After changing the flowers for several batches, of the course of a week or more I got what is technically called "Pommade". This is the fats saturated with the flowers' perfume. But to get to this phase you got to be utterly careful not to let the flowers overstay their welcome. You must change them every two days. Also, you must pay close attention to not allow any mould to form. The problem is, there is not a lot of ways to know when the mould will form - until it actually started. The literature I found about enfleurage talks about only week-long processing of the flowers, changing them every two days. But the fats did not have that much fragrance after a week. Also, mould could form within that week, depending not he amount of moisture in the atmosphere - and in the flowers.



The pommade is then washed with alcohol, or to be more exact: it is melted over low heat bain-marie with alcohol. Allowed to macerate for additional ten weeks. Then chilled and filtered. What you see in the image below is the warmed fats in the alcohol (on the left) and the spent flowers (the beaker on the right). The spent flowers can be composted, or extracted with absolute to create an "absolute from chassis".


The resulting alcohol  is really a perfume - alcohol with the plants essences in them. This is what you'll find in many old formula book labeled as "extrait of tuberose", "extrait of jasmine", and so on and so forth. This is not the complete process, but this is probably where a home enfleurageur should stop, to avoid unnecessary loss of material. And especially, if you're intending to use this in alcoholic perfumes anyway. Serious (read: commercial) enfleurage manufacturers would go on to evaporate the alcohol (preferably with a still, and in such way that they can re-use it), and will be left with an uber concentrated absolute from enfleurage.

Tarnished Silver

Naming has the power of brining our attention to the subtle qualities of a scent. In Tarnished Silver, botanical extract expert Dabney Rose brings forth the metallic qualities of violet. I've been fortunate to experience several of Dabney Rose's innovative botanical enfleurage of hyacinth, which she added to my order of hydrosols, and have also traded a copy of my book for her gorgeous pommades of tuberose breathtaking butterfly ginger which I have recently reviewed here. Tarnished Silver is the first perfume blend I'm experiencing from this talented lady. This time it arrived in my mailbox completely unannounced (though most welcome!) alongside a beautifully assembled collection of handicapped Kyphi incense. They all arrived right before I left for my trip, and I left them behind, knowing I will not have the appropriate conditions for incense burning on my travels.

Tarnished Silver, however, was tucked in my carry-on and I'm enjoying it immensely. I am now riding the train to the north part of Israel - the Western Galilee. Stretches of fields, meadows, orchards, and factories pass by the window, and glimpses of the Mediterranean sea delight the spirit as the train gently rocks and hums its way to our destination. There is wi-fi here (which I won't easily come by when I reach my home village, and off-the-grid hippie haven). So here I am again with a dab of Tarnished Silver on each wrist, enjoying the scenery.

It opens with a melancholy tinge of violets: at once sweet yet also bitter. Sharply green yet soft and diffused, almost powdery. It's amazing that fresh violets can be captured so beautifully with this vegan enfleurage - truly a labour of love. To the sweet ionone facets are added some other notes though subtle: honey, perhaps a tad of hay or flouve as well or something else that gives it a bitter sweet coumarin undertone. A touch of rose and oaks give it a very vintage feel, like Chypre from the turn of the 20th Century.

Tuberose Pommade and a Flower Meditation

The other enfleurage pommade I ordered from Dabney Rose was a tuberose one. If you've smelled fresh-cut tuberose before, you'll be appreciate the glorious beauty of the living flower that has been captured in the vegetable oil base of this pommade. You can read more about the process and what pommade means in my post about the equally stunning Butterfly Ginger pommade.

Capturing a living flower's true scent is an enormously challenging feat. Dabney Rose does an incredible labour of love growing her own plants in a glass hothouse and her own little garden, and she must be tending to each blossom and petal with much care while growing them, and of course handpicking and placing them in the coconut-base vegetable alternative to enfleurage.

The Tuberose Pommade brings to mind spring eternal when the entire room is intoxicated from a single cut stem. It transports you to a hot summer night on the beach, adorned with a lei of tuberoses and gardenias. I am yet to experience this in real life, but my imagination is quite satisfying and a dab of real tuberose is enough to make it feel real. All is needed is to close one's eyes and surrender your senses to this beauty, for it is fleeting.

The pommade is not a solid perfume, but a pure, single note extraction - a rather antique method, like the one invented in the city of Grasse. It does not last long, which demands you do pay attention to it while it lasts. With such rare beauty, a floral meditation is in order, once you apply this white unguent to pulse points or even finger tips. Take a few moments off your stressful day to appreciate this beauty. Or better yet - start your day that way. Dedicating the beginning of your day to gratitude and appreciation is the best way to start the day. Invite life's blessings and pause to fully appreciate it, and more will come your way.

Butterfly Ginger Pommade

Dabney Rose's Butterfly Ginger (Ginger Lily) Pommade is nothing short of a miracle. But for you to understand, let's first explain what pommade is. And no, it is not spelled "pomade", much to my autocorrect's disapproval. This is the French word for a step in the enfleurage process. Enfleurage is the fat (usually from an animal source) that has been fully saturated with a flower essence. Once this is achieved, the pommade will be washed with alcohol and produces an extrait (an alcoholic dilution of flower extract). When this alcohol is removed by evaporation, it leaves behind the pure flower absolute (much like any other extraction process).

There are a few things that are unique about Dabney Rose's pommade: first of all, she makes them by hand from plants that she lovingly grows in her garden and hothouse. Secondly, it is sold as is, without further washing in alcohol - thus offering a pure, fresh flower scent in a solid perfume form. Thirdly, the fats she uses to absorb the living flower's beautiful perfume are vegan (I believe it is coconut oil, but it might be mixed with other vegetable oils).

Specifically, the Butterfly Ginger Pommade is stunning. Even though it is made of just one plant, it smells like a complete perfume, yet also smells very alive. As a point of reference, thing of a floral green such as Laura Ashley No.1, sans all the sharp and headachy notes that this genre tends to give me (much to my dismay, as I do admire green florals). It also reminds me of a certain fancy soap that was the household name at my best friend's home: a fine white soap with a very clean yet floral, exotic aroma.

This ginger flower is not at all ginger-like, even though it could be described as slightly spicy. I haven't smelled it in real life, so forgive me if my points of reference are commercial items. At the same time though, I'm sure this is very true to a fresh living flower. It perfectly retains that character and authenticity. This is the kind of thing that you may not be able to describe, but you certainly can feel.

Dabney Rose's offerings are seasonal in nature, and are made in very small batches. The website doesn't a catalogue or shop yet, so it's best to follow here Facebook and twitter stream, and order immediately when something that strikes your fancy is out of her still or enfleurage trays.