Anya's Garden Perfumes + The Natural Perfumery Institute

After roses, I'll bet that orange blossoms, when in season, are the next most popular flower in a bridal bouquet.  Sweet yet seductive, the orange blossom has persisted through the centuries as a floral symbol of love.  Neroli, the distilled essence of the flower, if cherished for its ability to raise the spirits by generally providing an uplifting, beautiful aroma. My vintage neroli treasure comes from Lautier et Fils, a Grasse-based perfumerie and distillery dating back to the 18th Century.  I have found bits and pieces of the history of this well-regarded company on the Internet, most of it in French.  This was the only bottle from them I ever found.  When I took it from the refrigerator to photograph the other day, the glue had dried up, and the majority of the label started to fall to the floor.  As I reached to catch it, due to its age, it broke into pieces.  Using perhaps not the best solution, in a panic, I used tiny bits of double-stick glue...

I have been reseraching on the Internet for years, and I stumbled across an article, in French, on the early Grasse perfumery industry.  I laboriously translated it into English, and copied and pasted the twenty or so illustrations into the English version. What a lot of work, but worth it for my students! This image is just so lovely. It's of the pomade room at Robertet in the 1800's. Here's another image: This image is of the Roure Bertrand plant, and those are orange blossoms on the ground, and people with shovels, scooping them up into the distillation units you see around the wall. Neroli! If you click on the image, you will see it in a larger version.

  So What Variety of Orange Tree Gives us the Prized and Loved Neroli? The short answer is - nobody knows for sure, but it's pretty certain that it isn't soley the often named variety Citrus aurantium var. amara. I started this quest to find out what variety in my last blog post. I was trying to figure out why Citrus aurantium var. Bouquet des Fleurs wasn't named, since that was the variety I studied at one of the top citrus schools in the world. Turns out it's probably either/neither/a mix/or a bunch of others. I got feedback on a Yahoo group, and called UCR and spoke with one of the professors there. Neither source wanted to be quoted, since they're giving their opinion, and cannot point me to a source that will quote the facts. Due to their experience in the field, actually having visited neroli groves in several countries, I do accept their statements. Citrus hybridizes readily and oftentimes there are gaps in the groves due to a tree dying for a number of r...

A photo of the Neroli blossom Citrus aurantium var. Bouquet de Fleurs I posted this on several Yahoo groups today and I'm hoping to suss out the mystery of the proper name for the neroli tree: For years, I've questioned why C. aurantium var. amara was named as the source of neroli in all the aromatherapy (AT) books. I studied at a Citrus Research Center at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) and two of my professors there were among the authors of the industry Bibles, The Citrus Industry Vols. 1-4. I was taught that C. aurantium var. Bouquet de Fleurs was the source of neroli. We had a beautiful stand of the small, rounded trees growing on campus. Early one Sunday morning, my husband and I went down the row, bucket in hand, vodka in bucket, harvesting as many flowers as possible. The tincture was heavenly! For years, however, in my dyslexic way, I reversed the name. I called it Fleurs des Bouquet, and I couldn't find any reference to it. I've since lost ...