The Scent of Spring 2011

The first day I smelled the scent of spring in 2011 was Monday, January 10.

In the past I've always associated it with an unusually warm and sunny winter day but Monday it was snowing in Seattle: soft, clumpy flakes drifting down from the sky on and off all day long, leaving a frosting of white on the grass and car windows.

Still when I left work in the afternoon, there was that piercing sweet scent that I immediately identified as sweet box (sarcococcus humilis, I believe, though I am a little confused by my sarococcus species).

The scent is hard to describe but almost everyone describes it as piercing. For instance, I found this blog post by Barbara Wilde who gardens in Paris and found it wafting out of Parc Monceau. She describes it as powerful and piercingly sweet.

Another common description, and one I have used in the past, is the sensation of being stopped in your tracks, as described by Sue Taylor in an article at Dave’s Garden. She compares the scent to honey.

This year my first thought was of violets. Mary Robson at Muck About describes the fragrance as vanilla and honey. She brings in branches in November and “forces’ them to bloom indoors.

I have tried this myself as a way to extend this delicious scent but it really loses its charm after a few hours in a warm house and becomes cloying. I prefer that elusive, piercing, evasive scent that surprises me on a winter day with its promise of spring.

Sillage

I'm finishing up my blogging about trying to capture the scent of flowers, as I prepare for my new adventure: eating flowers. Thought I would do a last blog on sillage. Such an interesting word and one you will add to your vocabulary if you haunt perfume blogs, as I do.

Sillage is used in the perfume world to describe the trail of scent you leave behind when you pass through a room. It is a French word, pronounced see-yazh, for the wake of the ship, from the same root as a word that also means furrow. In that sense it is an impression, but a transient one, one that will dissolve or resolve.

Michelle Krell Kydd at Glass Petal Smoke has a good story about stealing mojo from a man with her sillage. Patty White at Perfume Posse wrote this lovely essay on the sillage of her mother-in-law's life. An interesting concept. At Bois de Jasmin, another one of my favorite perfume blogs, a reader mentions that when people ask her about the scent she's wearing, she worries that she put on too much. She ends with the comment: "sillage is almost illegal in the U.S."

I have been feeling very self-conscious in fragrance-free Seattle about wearing scent. My current favorite is Mimosa Pour Moi by L'Artisan. It is a soft, powdery scent with a honey undertone, and so far no one has noticed my sillage.

The amazing photograph was taken by Rennett Stowe and I found it at Flickr.com

Red Valerian: Fragrant or Stinky?

This plant (centhrantus rubra) blooms all over my neighborhood and I like its common name: Jupiter's Beard. I hoped there was some mythological association between the plant and Jupiter, but after checking extensive Googling and checking my primary source for mythology of plants on the web, Paghat, I couldn't find any. I suspect the name comes from the belief that Jupiter's beard was red.

I haven't paid much attention to it because it doesn't do much, except spring up exuberantly as early as April and continue blooming far into November. The bees love it but it's not edible, medicinal or fragrant.

Or so I thought until last month when I was walking by a large patch in bloom and I smelled a most heavenly odor. Knowing that I sometimes assume flowers don't have fragrance when they do (I was totally shocked by my first fragrant rhododendron), I bent down and inhaled. Quite a nice fragrance--it reminded me a bit of grape jelly.

But on a later walk, when I decided to validate my findings, I couldn't discern any scent at all. I wondered if this was one of those flowers that is fragrant only before it's pollinated and then loses its scent.

And during a quick search of the web today, before posting this entry, I found various descriptions of its smell, all contradictory. There are many entries which claim its fragrant, without describing the fragrance. One post said it smelled like vanilla. Another just said it smelled "divine." That was it for the positive associations.

Plants for the Future has a reference to it as smelling like perspiration. One gardener at Dave's garden complained that the cut flowers smelled like "cat pee." Web sites describing the flowers blooming wild in England said the smell was "doggy," as in "stale dog dung" or "catty."

I know that true valerian (the one that does have herbal properties) has such an unpleasant odor that early herbalists, Discorides and Galen, named it Phu. At least that's what Mrs. Grieves reports in her herbal. And the two valerians are in the same family.

What's going on? What does red valerian really smell like? I'm going out to smell some right now. If you have some in your neighborhood, please check it out and let me know what you think?

The photo came from the Washington State University site.

Enfleurage

In my last post, where I featured Octavian’s suggestions for reproducing the smell of wisteria, I forgot to mention that it’s necessary to reproduce the scent of wisteria because it’s one of those flowers whose scent cannot be extracted directly. Many of my favorite fragrant flowers fall in this category: lily of the valley, gardenia, tuberose, jasmine, lilac, iris and wisteria. These fragile flowers crumple when exposed to the heat of the steam which is used to distill scent from other hardier flowers (like lavender and rose).

Of course, this didn’t stop people who wanted to capture the scent of these flowers from developing a method to do so. It’s been around since ancient times and it’s called enfleurage, a name which is actually much prettier than the process.

In its most developed form, as practiced in Grasse, the perfume center of France, during the nineteenth century, fresh flower petals are placed on panes of glass which are smeared with purified fat. The fat absorbs the odors of the flowers, which are replenished when they are spent, until the fat is thoroughly imbued with fragrance. Then the scented fat, which is called a pomade, is washed with alcohol which absorbs the scent. The leftover scented fat was often used to make soap. The scented alcohol is called an absolute. If the alcohol is allowed to evaporate, what is left is an essential oil.

There are more primitive ways of creating the same effect, including simply stirring flowers into hot fat until it absorbs their odors. This cheerful article at Mother Earth News explains how to do enfleurage in your kitchen. I’m not sure I agree that you can use rubbing alcohol; I believe my Natural Perfumery teacher (Jeanne Rose) would shudder at this, because rubbing alcohol has a strong odor of its own which would affect your end result.

The illustration of women handling the chassis used in the enfleurage process comes from Sacred Earth which also explains the process, along with other methods used to extract scent from flowers.

The Scent of Wisteria

I've been working on a series of essays for the past year about my experiences getting to know the flowers that flourish along the eight blocks I walk between my apartment on the top of Capitol Hill in Seattle and my work at Richard Hugo House, at the corner of Pine and Eleventh. I assigned myself a series of tasks, one per month (I love being a teacher and I love being a student). My task for June is to figure out how to capture the scent of flowers. So I plan to post entries on my experiments and let you know how they are going.

Tonight as I walked home on a sunny summer evening I was noticing the scent of wisteria. To me it has a pleasant, creamy vanilla scent. So I was pleased when I went searching online to see that Octavian, one of my favorite perfume writers (I know him from his comments on Luca Turin's perfume blog) has written an entry at his own blog, 1000 Perfumes, carefully analyzing the scent of wisteria with much more precision than my nose can register.

I hadn't considered the difference color might make in the scent of a wisteria until I read Octavian's entry (though I know from much experimentation that I love the smell of purple irises more than any other color). All of the wisteria on my walk was purple.

A few years ago, when I was learning about wine (in the process of researching a wine mystery novel which never got written), I developed much more discrimination in my ability to identify flavors and scents. As I learn about scents, I am trying to increase my scent vocabulary as well. (Oddly enough many of the scents I encountered today reminded me of banana (and I love the scent of banana, especially artificial banana flavor. I don't know what caused this olfactory delusion.)

What does wisteria smell like to you?

Fragrant Rhododendrons

Ever since I read the book Tales of the Rose Tree by Jane Brown and learned that the earliest rhododendrons, brought to England from Nepal and China by plant explorers, were fragrant, I’ve been searching for a fragrant rhododendron. Seattle is rhododendron city; there’s a rhodie on every block, practically every yard. It’s our state flower after all. But, despite sniffing every rhodendron I passed, I couldn’t find one with any scent. That’s partly because, as with other highly hybridized flowers, the scent has been bred out of them in favor of big blossoms and vivid colors.

Then on May 1, when I was leaving the Museum of History and Industry after a great reunion of Nearby History participants, I smelled the most intoxicating fragrance. I looked around and the only blossoms in sight were on a huge rhododendron with large white flowers. So I thought I would try sniffing the blossoms. Ah! A heavenly aroma. A truly fragrant rhododendron.

A few days later, I was celebrating an impromptu May ceremony with some friends, tossing wreaths into the lagoons at the end of the Arboretum, when I saw another white rhododendron, right next to the gatehouse that leads into Broadmoor. I pointed it out and we went over to smell it. Again, that intoxicating fragrance, a lot like honeysuckle. We stuck our noses deep into the blossoms to inhale the scent and when we raised our heads, there were smudges of pollen on our noses and sticky pistils. The flower had lured us, hapless pollinators, to spread its seed around. A perfect ending for May Day.

The photograph above is not either of the bushes described but it may be the same cultivar. This is Polar Bear and it’s a fragrant rhododendron offered for sale by Banwy Valley Nursery in the UK.

The Berkeley Horticultural Nursery has a wonderful list of fragrant rhododendron cultivars.

I was especially fascinated by the distinctions made in describing their scents. Bill Massey is very fragrant with cinnamon/chocolate overtones. Fragrantissimum smells of honeysuckle and nutmeg. And Fragrantissimum Improved has “an almost tropical fragrance with nuances of jasmine and cloves.” McNabbi smells like nutmeg and Mi Amor has hints of musk and tarragon. Paul Molinari has the scent of wild honeysuckle (I have a feeling this is the cultivar I enjoyed) while Scott’s Valentine smells like jasmine. It’s enough to make me run out and buy some rhododendrons for my garden.

One thing this flower project is doing for me is making me fall in love with flowers I always disdained (like the bergenia and the big showy, scentless rhodies).