Appreciating Ayala Moriel

Smelly friends make the best friends. I have been lucky in that I have so many, sprinkled around the globe, to do swaps with. Lately I received a slim package in my mailbox from Ayala Moriel. That Ayala is a highly esteemed perfumer is no secret. She also has a talented hand at incense, another fragrant pursuit she has had perhaps as long as or longer, than perfume.

Her recent perfume release; Komorebi (roughly translated from the Japanese as the shimmering, dappled light in a very much alive forest) was a revelation to me. It seemed to encompass something much larger than a ‘perfume’ and grew on my skin into … a whole forest. The towering ancients were there as well as the supporting cast of the understory and I was having the forest experience! The vial went missing for a while and evidently made a reappearance in my husband’s keep. Which is fine with me as I still get to enjoy it.

To be so masterful with fragrance materials readily transfers to incense. Her vetiver  Kyphi was INCREDIBLE. At some point in her life she had to have been a ‘ladybug’ on the wall when the ancient Egyptian priests were formulating in their temples. The vetiver component weaves it's own melody through the song with a voice so smooth you would think vetiver is indigenous to Egypt (which I don't think it is; Doesn't Matter.) and a favorite of said priests.   I will be hoarding and eking this one out for a long long time.

Other incense blends to fall into my lap were cones, each one in a slightly different shape and size which clearly marks them as Hand Made, which is to me the highest compliment to bestow. They are layered and complex as beautifully as her perfumes. It’s futile to choose a favorite out of ‘Sweet Tobacco’, “Chypre Birds”, ‘Song of Songs’ and the Agarwood; they are all perfect for different moods and I break a tiny piece off to heat as I gave up the habit of actual burning incense; heating them releases the scents without scorching.

Now I have put myself in a mood to go do some listening. : )

Enfleurage; the poetic form of capturing fragrance.

The practice of enfleurage (a French term for a fragrance extraction method used in perfumery) is in itself pure poetry. The flowers and their fragrances, the gentle slow way of picking them and layering them into the frames... all speak the language of beauty and grace. I feel captured myself. 

Lilac Corner is holding another course, to start February 6th.
Contact Dabney at scent@dabney-rose.com to get more information.

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grounding the dream (or, the birth of Lilac Corner)

Work with me here friends; Envision! Envision! With the purchase of this tiny (acre & a half) farm {flower farm} we are finally able to ground the dream that has been in vapors for a year and a half. I will give you the bare bones of the back story; we needed to move. I had contracted lilac fever (to add to rose, violet, etc fever) and needed a cooler place to grow them than where we were living. For a long time our sights were set on NY but...NY did not work out. A very good friend living just an hour north of us pulled and pulled and pulled our rope until finally we were perched on the side of the Blue Ridge Mountains, at 3000 ft elevation (up from 900) and a mere mile & a half from the Blue Ridge Parkway. As someone who had played along this backbone (not to mention the rest of the animal) of  the surrounding mountains for half her life, this last bit was a serious coup.

We ended up on a corner lot, of all things to be had 'out in the sticks'. Well I had the solution to that and it would take more patience before the whole dream coalesced from the mists. But does a dream ever fully coalesce before trailing off into a wisp of another direction?

To all those people driving by and wondering " who is that crazy woman digging holes at 7:15 a.m. or, in the rain??" It's me! This woman who is always swaddled in the mists of her dreams and requires poetry even as her mailing address. This woman whose vapors are scented by the flowers in her head and in the thousands of holes she digs across the span of her life. Whose vapors sometimes precede her; there was an elderly lilac already in residence.

Which put me up to 12 lilacs, 11 who had been uncomfortably waiting in pots, some for over a year while we waited for the mists to clear enough to give us guidance. Four of them were dragged down from NY, no doubt to pout in the heat and wonder "what the...". They should be happy now. Eight of them went into making 'the corner' and the remaining 3 went down to the bottom corner along with the weeping cherry I had started from a seed, 3 years ago and that many feet tall.

Prunus, dear Prunus mume, who had spent all 9 years of her life in a pot has now been liberated/released into the wild...the wild abandon of root freedom and into the wilderness of microbes between her toes.

The violet collection went through a major downsizing as we decided to wait till next summer to put up the glasshouse; the ark sailed with only one of each of the 8 different Odoratas, knowing that one violet plant is really a mama with fledglings under her skirt.

The roses are lined up out in the field under the watch of Urnnie.

And hosts of others. I never made a head count but I'd bet at least 40 plants moved up with us; from 'too large for one person to lift' to numerous small ones tucked in together. Some had been following me around for decades (the roses; 28 years) to last minute grabs as we fled before the developer's bulldozers arrived. I had a lot of help from understanding family & friends!

                                          ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 Another 'affliction' of mine is cyclamen fever. On one of our early trips from bringing a load of stuff  up from the flatlands, there, perched on the deck railing was a cyclamen. 

This post is dedicated to Steve.

Hyacinth in August

Perhaps it was because i ordered 25 (and that's not really all that many, compared to the 100 i would have rather gotten) hyacinth bulbs to force for spring enfleurage, but tonight i gave myself a hyacinth bath by pouring a few ounces of my grade B- hyacinth enfleurage pommade floral water into the bath tub. I caught a whiff or two as it shot up to the ceiling in a column of steamy vapor. Maybe it will even condense over night and we'll have hyacinth dew in the tub in the morning.
Always looking for ways to play with the flowers.

hedychium heat

The heat of summer lengthens like it is stretching out on the divan and the Ginger Lilies say; "bring it on". Or maybe it is the intensifying song of summer insects that  push the tubular buds out of their torches to spice up the evening with their fragrance. They announce their arrival with fluttering fanfare.

Butterfly Ginger is another fitting moniker but I want to up the ante with the white ones and call them Faerie Ginger. I have so far hunted down 3 different colors to grace the garden and each one is a favorite.

Not many people are familiar with the scent of Ginger Lilies, outside a little brown bottle, and they are as different as a caterpillar and a butterfly. Ginger Lilies enfleurage better than they distill but just to have them in the garden can and should be enough.

They can be grown up to zone 6 with good winter mulching.

amongst the privileged class

It's a hard summer. It's torrid. We're scorched, we're parched. The rain barrels are so dry their lips are cracked. Every day is a hammering and every living thing, a nail.

Most of the garden has been in pots for almost a year {are we ever going to move ?? } The combination of a steady diet of chlorine from the hose plus everyone's roots getting overheated from being in said pots has led to an alarming number of members on the compost pile.

Which is why the Cyclamen and her quiet, delicate charms have been carried inside to the living room. When the last bars of sun come through the window and set her petals alight, she fills the room with the fragrance of violets airbrushed with muguet. Need i say more.

least anyone think she is easy in Any kind of way; it took me 72 shots with 2 cameras to get these few.

lilac geek

In down home NC the lilacs 'come & go in a heated rush' and it is So disappointing. I wanted to experience the LILAC that made it's legend and finally coincided a visit to my daughter's farm in NYS at lilac time; a full month and a half after their flash appearance in NC.

As soon as, as SOON as we crossed the state line into NY, there, even at an abandoned truck weigh station (i now have a higher regard for NY truckers) were clumps in several colors. As we drove on through the state, it became apparent that lilacs outnumber the people. My kind of place.

I was a little worried that we might have been too late for the peak of their bloom, and we were just a bit but it mattered not. Here in the cooler climate (frost on May 22) they blossom in s l o w motion, the opposite of what they do down here.

I was not prepared for the gorgeousness of their shades of colors, even on one cluster. I had read about double flowers but had never seen one. The fragrance seemed to be most prevalent in the evenings, after the day had warmed up and would waft through opened windows.

Besides attending a Very Special Baby Shower, on my agenda was to deepen the enfleurage pommade i had started in March, when i forced my own puny specimens in the glasshouse.  Once surrounded by these bent & twisted elders (one clump was swallowing the pear tree) i fell down the lilac rabbit hole. The house itself is 222 years old; could one of these lilacs be close to that old??

Did i mention the Very Special Baby Shower? I had brought along my new prize possession; 'Cooking with Flowers' by Miche Bacher which had my head spinning with possibilities for something supremely fabulous. I went for lilac jelly as i was bewitched by the jewel tones. I was hoping the jelly/syrup would actually turn out to be the same color as the infusion, and next time i will use a pectin that doesn't require lemon juice; which wonked it into day glow pink.

Never having made jelly before, we ended up with lilac syrup but i heard no complaints. Also, lilac shortbread had to appear to pour it on. (As i am sugar sensitive, i was not able to have even a taste of these two delights  but was assured over and over that yes it tastes of lilac and i  watched it merrily disappear.)

BTW; the Lily of the Valley up there beat the pants off mine as well.