Anya's Garden Perfumes + The Natural Perfumery Institute

  Ask the Perfumer Dec 28, 2013 and a Year-end Beauty: Golden Gardenia by  Anya McCoy  |  Dec 29, 2013  |  Anya's Garden Perfumes ,  Perfume From Your Garden book ,  raw materials of perfumery  |  10 comments This is the last “Ask the Perfumer” forum for this year. I’ve been busy with the winter garden in Miami, and have to play catchup with my blog posts. So, if you have any perfumery questions, I’ll be here until 10PM ET tonight. Photo from logees.com We had a lot of rain last night, and my garden is so happy! This is a nice nitrogen boost for my plants, and the moistness makes for a welcoming soil bed for my Gardenia jasminoides var. “Aurea” – yellow gardenia. It looks like a yellow rose, doesn’t it? It’s a variety of the common gardenia we all know and love. When I enfleurage “regular” gardenias, and by that I mean G. jasminoides and G. vietnamensis, and G. tahitiensis, they all turn that color a day or two into the process. Quite beautiful, yes? Do you grow gardenias? Have you

  Ask the Perfumer forum Jan. 12, 2014 – and a Vetiver house 🙂 by  Anya McCoy  |  Jan 12, 2014  |  Perfume From Your Garden book  |  4 comments I’m reposting some of my photos and brief comments from my Perfume From Your Garden Book page on Facebook here. There are a lot of comments on that page, so if you’d like to join us there, please do. It can be found  here . From last week: People could hollow this out for a tiny hut! Whew! Just finished up the Plant Pages for the book Perfume From Your Garden, but I need to go back and rework the charts on each plant, which includes growing information and extraction methods. The last plant is ylang-ylang, but I thought that this photo of vetiver roots would stop you in your tracks. It can grow to 4 meters – that’s right, 12 feet. There are reports of 6-meter-long harvests in commercial operations. I grow mine in pots ranging from 2 to 3 feet in depth, and that provides more than enough vetiver for my uses. It takes 18 months to mature and doe

  Ask the Perfumer forum and Tropical Lilac! 12/8/2013 by  Anya McCoy  |  Dec 8, 2013  |  Anya's Garden Perfumes  |  6 comments I’ll be here until 10 tonight to answer your perfumery questions and take time out to play with the velvety, highly-scented *leaves* of the tropical lilac plant I found yesterday. I’ve been searching online for a long time for it and accidentally stumbled across it when I went to buy an elderberry plant Friday. Cornutia grandifolia trained as a tree. Source trees454blog I was looking at the Everglades cherry tomato plants (another one I’ve lusted after for some time!) and saw these pots with huge, velvety leaves. The nursery didn’t mention the plant as available on their website. Their garden helper didn’t know the plant's name, esp. the botanical name I used. Finally, after I had him load it into my cart, and I was paying, I remembered tropical lilac or Jamaican lilac, and he said “yes, yes,” which confirmed what I already knew. See how pretty those f