Anya's Garden Perfumes + The Natural Perfumery Institute

This is the first perfume bottle I ever purchased as a collectible.  I was living in Syracuse, New York and was a student.  I couldn't resist this Devilbiss black and chrome Art Deco beauty, and I have cherished it from the day I obtained it.  It's traveled from Syracuse to Tampa, to Philadelphia, to Naples (FL) and then Fort Lauderdale and eventually to Miami.  It now resides on the upper right shelf of my new perfume display cabinet.  It only cost $12, but it is priceless and irreplaceable to me.  From research, I believe it was made in 1927. A triptych view of my Devilbiss:

Nothing is better than a good night's sleep, then walking out into the garden. The pink guavas are adorable, but the baby pineapples are cuter!  An heirloom tomato and smoked mozzarella makes a lovely breakfast.  Warm, breezy morning in Miami, and I'm enjoying every  minute of it.

I recently blogged about all of the vanilla orchid flower buds on my vine.  They've been opening in the past week, and I admit I missed a lot of the blooms because of the ongoing hospitalization of my mother.  Also, I never got around to making the special paintbrush that I would have needed to hand pollinate them.  So today I'll just be sharing the tropical beauty of this flower.  Vanilla is the only species out of 20,000 orchid species that has a usable "fruit", the vanilla bean. You can click on any image to enlarge it. This flower is half open.  I like how the Jasminium officinale leaves are intertwined with the vanilla vine. This is a spent/unpollinated vanilla flower.  Isn't is similar in looks, if you look at just one segment, of an aged, glistening vanilla bean?

The aglaia tree in the front garden is in full bloom, the mimosa, too!  Yet, my heart is pulled to the shady area on the back fence, where my vanilla vine is budding out.  Probably due to the warm winter, the vine, which rambles in and out amongst three varieties of jasmines, is full of buds.  I've never seen so many on it, and I've had it 24 years!  I may succumb to the fantasy that I'll be able to pollinate the buds when they open.  There's a very specific way to bend a small paintbrush to reach inside.  I think it's angled to 40 degrees, and I'll have to check the specifics.  There is a moth that pollinates it in Madagascar and other regions where it's grown commercially, an I don't think that moth lives here in Miami.  I've also read how laborious it is to properly age and develop the vanillin in the beans once they are harvested.  DON'T look to eHow for any advice!  Mercy, how wrong they are on everything.  There are several dozen flower

I've decided to get serious about creating a photo album of my perfume treasures.  I have never had the heart to break this bottle to get at the contents.  I have tried every method possible to get the stopper out, but to no avail. I adore cassie absolute, so you know I have great self control - and a respect for a true antique. 1906! I think you can click the image on to enlarge it.  You can see the one-ounce bottle is about 2/3rd full.  Another perfume once told me to smash the bottle with a hammer and filter the contents. NO!

  It's 79F in Miami right now, and I just came inside after photographing some flowers in the front garden.  I'm going right outside to work on the veggie garden in the back, but I had to stop and share these photos with you.  Jasmines and aglaias are easy to grow indoors.  Have I tempted you to get some for yourself? The underside of the glorious Jasmine grandiflorum has a slight pink tinge, hinted at in the unopened bud, below.  I so adore this plant!  I don't harvest the ones from my garden for enfleurage or tincture anymore, I just like to enjoy them scenting the air in my garden. This is a big cluster of aglaia odorata flowers.  I cannot urge you strongly enough to grow this!  Even if you're in a studio apartment, you can easily grow this carefree, extremely fragrant plant.  Each cluster panicle of flowers you see is a little bigger than a thumb.  The flowers are tiny, but their scent "throws" out about 30 ft or 10 meters!  They don't' g

I'm so pleased to announce the winners of the three random drawings in the Joy in January blog event of the Natural Perfumers Guild Day 1 winner of 15mls of Light EdP - HollyF Day 2 winner of four Food & Drink oils - Dana Day 3 winner of the complete set of 12 of my perfume samples - Hemla Please write to me by midnight, June 21st to claim your prize. Thanks again to everyone for helping the Guild bring a little Joy in January by sharing your storie!

 Joy in January - a three-day blogging event to help you deal with your SAD-ness this month. If you're reading this on the second day of the three-day blog event, you can read my initial post about SAD and scents here . When I moved to Syracuse, New York in 1980 for grad school, it was a very impulsive move on th part of my (ex) husband and myself.  He was offered a great job, and we welcomed a move from a very remote small Florida town where the biggest thrill was guessing how many alligators were in the lake across the road. I knew Syracuse was super-cold and super-snowy, but I didn't know it held the rather dismal record as having the least amount of days with sunshine in the USA -- only 55 days of sun per year! That's the number I remember reading in the paper there, but some latest data I looked up doesn't support that .  Still, it's up there in terms of cloudy, rainy, snowy days.  I know that it snowed so much, every day in the winter, that many of us

Green bananas just two days ago - ripened into the lovely fruits, below I'd love to share a wonderful resource with you.  This is for all who live in warm climates and who love to grow their own.  I just harvested some rare small bananas from my garden today (unknown variety) and received an email query from a Guild member, asking for an ID on a sour orange someone had given her.  She intends to macerate the skin in some fixed oil.  I sent her the link with a joke - more info than you ever need to know! Yummy hand of organic small bananas harvested  today, Dec. 27, 2011 in Miami  - some missing because the cook had dibs. In 1977/78, as I was in my senior year at the University of California, Riverside, one of the world's great think tanks, I asked my major professor, Dr. Gene Anderson, if I could obtain a change of major from anthropology (ethnobotany), which I was working on under him, to economic botany, since I felt closely aligned with Julia Morton, who ha

I wrote an article for CaFleureBon that gives you alternatives. http://www.cafleurebon.com/what-to-do-when-you-love-a-perfume-but-it-doesnt-like-you-unrequited-love-draw/ Introduction: "Scrubber"; the dreaded word of every die hard perfumista . We want to love you  Guerlain's Vol A Nuit, but you can be a swamp thing on our our skin, Carnal Flower by Dominique Ropion can be a venus flytrap, Chanel No 5 is an adehydlic nightmare and Fairchild by Anya McCoy is an unloved-child.   So what do you, if you love the fragrance  but not on you? You ask a perfumer who created a difficult scent to wear…(Disclaimer: On Editor's skin all of the above people have been known to run away in fear). Anya McCoy of  Anya's Garden :  When you go to a department store, perfume boutique, or buy a perfume sample online, the first thing you should do, after smelling the perfume out of the bottle or on a scent strip, is conduct a skin test. Most of us just dab or spritz on our wrist

I clicked on the link and was truly surprised and delighted - Fragrantica chose my entire line of 12 perfumes to feature this week.  Each perfume is linked to an astrological sign, according to the selection by Hieronimuss, the astrologer for Fragrantica. Click here to read his savvy suggestions. I'm offering all of my perfumes and botanicals for 25% off to celebrate this fun event. Click here and use the code fragrantica for 25% off through Dec. 11th.  For 10% off my perfumery course and kits, use the code F73480022F at the Natural Perfumery Institute page by clicking here.    

Flora, our Guild muse, is surrounded by stars as she holds the fragrance that represents the 13th astrological sign, Ophiucus.  Flora last held the modernistic scents of the 21st Century perfumes of the Guild's Brave New Scents Project, and now finds herself sent back to prehistoric, primordial times.  Flora is cool, she is unflappable to the Mystery of Musk, the Outlaw Perfumers didn't faze her, and we love that she moves through time and scent with us. It was into the stars, and the night sky, when the constellations are visible that we ventured, and here is my take on the inspiration of Ophiucus. 13th Sign Project – Ophiucus – Natural Perfumers Guild Nov. 28, 2011 White Smoke – The First Perfume of Anya’s Garden’s Prima Aroma Line When Michelyn Camen, the Editor-in-Chief of the Ca Fleure Bon blog approached the Natural Perfumers Guild with the idea of blogging about the almost-forgotten 13th astrological sign, Ophiuchus, (Pronounced as OFF-ee-YOO-kuss) I immediately s

Looks so sweet, yes?  Smells like s**t at night. Jasminum auriculatum.  Harvest during the day for tincture or enfleurage.  Obviously! I have lots to do in the garden today.  I'm repainting the ironwork post by the front door.  Since the jasmine auriculatum was dug up and planted by the back fence, I'm readying the post for a jasmine grandiflorum plant. The auric was a little too fecal smelling at night! Not a nice greeting for visitors, LOL.  Plus, the more delicate foliage of the grandi will lighten up the spot.  That post is the one I'm posing by  in the photo, and I'll take a new one next spring when the pruned grandi has a chance to grow up. Oh, and I'll also be transplanting lots of veggies into the garden out back.  Collards, cabbage, tomatoes, lettuces, parsley, thyme, mint, zinnias, etc.,etc.  We're having beautiful weather, so it will be enjoyable. The j. auric foliage was just starting to fill in here.  It became a thick mass of dark leaves.  I

The first Acacia farnesiana - Cassie - flower to bloom in Anya's Garden. I got the first acacia flower today on my young tree.  Acacia farnesiana is the source of beautiful cassie absolute, and I'm already planning a harvest that will yield me a usable raw material for my perfumery - hence the hopeless romantic/cup half full type.  I have to be to see all that in this one tiny flower.  Cassie absolute is a prized perfume ingredient, and it can be fractionally distilled to yield alpha ionone, a natural isolate that smells like violet flowers. It is supposed to bloom winter through spring, so this is the start of my first cassie enfleurage.  I'm preparing a little enfleurage container for the flower, and I'll add the others as they bloom.  I'll have to use leather gloves to harvest them, as the tree is very thorny.  Oh, and I'm going to trim the tree down into a big bush, probably 7' x 7', much like my ylang ylang.  This is necessary to harvest the flow

I read about this very fragrant apple-size muskmelon several years ago, and I finally got around to getting some seeds so I can grow it.  They're germinating in starter pots and I'll transplant them in a few weeks.  They'll need some support to grow up for optimum yield, so I'm clearing out some Delicious Monster vines by the fence. (more about them in a future post) The flesh is insipid, so it's not an eating melon, but oh, the descriptions I've read about the rind!  Rich, diffusive melon sweet honey pretty.  That's enough for me!  Just two can fragrance a room for several days.  Victorian ladies, who called this Queen Anne pocket melon, would carry one in a pocket so fragrance the air around them.  I got my seeds from Southern Seed Exchange. I, of course, intend to tincture the rinds and make a fragrant melon-scented extract. Do you grow any unusual fragrant plants?  I'd love to hear about them, so please leave a comment.

My first photo of my first ylang flower in the hot, bright Miami sun. Ylang ylang trees can quickly and easily grow to 40' in Miami.  That is the major reason I put off growing one for so many years.   Then I read that in Madagascar, where the trees are grown for their fragrant flowers, which are a major economic resource for the perfume industry, are kept pruned to six to 10 feet so the flowers are easy to harvest.  So, about a year and a half ago I planted a tiny four foot tree and have had to prune it so it's now about 7' tall. The young green blooms are cute!  However, their scent is very weak, so they can't be harvested yet. Ylang ylang trees bloom in the Autumn, I read, but friends who have visited Fairchild gardens report they can bloom year round.  Friends who have them growing in their neighborhoods, not their own lots (since they're so big and can overwhelm a city lot) couldn't recall what time of year they bloomed.  I furth

  The Outlaw Perfumers are honoring the aromatics of the 21st Century Nothing says innovation like using materials that are cutting edge. We realized that many new aromatics had been brought to market since the year 2000 - things like lilac CO2, gardenia absolute, aglaia flower and many more.  Also appearing were previously-unknown to the artisan niche community of perfumers fragrant beauties like linden flower CO2, wild rose absolute and yuzu essential oil.   Many of the perfumers in the Guild, myself included, were making fragrant tinctures of rare and stunning aromatic materials, from freeze-dried strawberries to obscure jasmines. So, what's an Outlaw Perfumer to do? Gather those lovelies, and include materials like lotus absolutes, which weren't used by traditional perfumers, but were in use in India for many years, and create some Brave New Scents, unfettered by IFRA. My muse was ancient India, brought into the present, once again (remember Kewdra from the Mystery of

I'm honored to be chosen as the perfumer featured in the kick-off of a series on American Perfumery on Cafleurebon (click on Cafleurebon to read).  Leave a comment before July 5th and you'll be in the running to receive a 3.5ml mini extrait of my RiverCali perfume.

Can you help me?  I need two things from my readers. There will be a freebie gift for two helpful souls who reply, one for each subject. First:  Back in late 2006, I stumbled across *fresh* ginger root essential oil at liberty natural.  There were two - one from Madagascar, one from Indonesia.  I immediately told my perfumery friends about it, and I used the fresh version in the kits for my students.  Why the excitement? Fresh grated ginger - zest, fresh, hot, spicy fragrance Previously, the only ginger root oil available was from the peeled, sun-dried roots, and it was a middle note for perfumery.  It had a mellow, soft fragrance, much like the dried ginger powder you get for baking purposes.  This fresh ginger, on the other hand, smelled just like the fresh cut or grated root!  Hot, spicy, wet, luscious, and a top note! I've used the aged, dried ginger EO, because it is valuable in perfumery and for food and drink purposes, but its soft character was just that, soft, c

Well, maybe Gaia of The Non Blonde blog goes a step further - she notes that Kewdra is " An all-natural and botanical dirty musk, as carnal as it gets and then some"  My online store is closed until Jan. 5, 2011, but you can place an order now and it'll be shipped Jan 6th or so.  Use the code "holiday" (without the quote marks) for 10% off.