Anya's Garden Perfumes + The Natural Perfumery Institute

There's still a little bit of rose centifolia wafting over from last week.  Ian of Shirley Price Aromatherapy sent a detailed comment to the blog after hours.  You might like to read it here .  Just scroll down the comments to find Ian's comment. My garden is alive with the fragrance of so many gorgeous blooming plants right now!  All the jasmines, the Brunfelsia (nighttime clove/carnation scent), the Tahitian and Vietnamese gardenias, and of course, the dependable Aglaia odorata - Chinese Perfume tree.  It sometimes seems this tree only takes a tiny break between flowering.  The Full Moon certainly brought it to full flush. Last night I attended a memorial for Bob McCulley, the gardener who took care of my plants.  I introduced Bob to the Aglaia, and he started to introduce them to gardens all over Miami Shores and North Miami.  He grew to love this carefree fragrant tree as much as I did. This lemon/floral-scented beauty is a tidy small tr...

  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!...

I adore neroli, but the neroli that is what we call the essential oil distilled from the blossoms of Citrus aurantium does not compare to the scent of those blossoms in the garden. I first created a natural tincture/absolute of those blossoms about 30 years ago at the University of California, Riverside, armed only with a bucket of vodka. ;-) Into the vodka went the blossoms where they were left to tincture for a day, and then the vodka was recharged with more blossoms three or four times. The resulting extraction was true to the blossoms' scent, and cherished by me for several years as I used it to make perfumes. Aglaia flower is often called Chinese lemon tree or Chinese perfume tree among other names. The scent of the blooms in the garden, again, like the neroli, is quite different from the concrete or absolute we perfumers purchase. While glorious, fruity, floral, with a touch of tea, the commercial extract is missing the beautiful soft, uplifting nuances of the flower. The flo...