Waverly Time

In my last newsletter, I wrote about showing up late for a BBQ with the excuse that I was late because I was working in my garden, and later realizing that I was living in "plant time," an entirely different kind of time than clock time.

Well, this weekend, the same friend invited me to yet another BBQ (his apartment building is famous for their long, hospitable BBQs) and this time, when he left the message he said: "It starts at 3 PM people time, not Waverly time." And that got me started thinking about a whole new kind of time: Waverly time.

I didn't make it to the BBQ but that's because I was living in Waverly time. In Waverly time, you are never rushed and you do things when you feel like doing them. That's all I know so far about Waverly time. But I find the whole concept delightful.

Red Valerian: Fragrant or Stinky?

This plant (centhrantus rubra) blooms all over my neighborhood and I like its common name: Jupiter's Beard. I hoped there was some mythological association between the plant and Jupiter, but after checking extensive Googling and checking my primary source for mythology of plants on the web, Paghat, I couldn't find any. I suspect the name comes from the belief that Jupiter's beard was red.

I haven't paid much attention to it because it doesn't do much, except spring up exuberantly as early as April and continue blooming far into November. The bees love it but it's not edible, medicinal or fragrant.

Or so I thought until last month when I was walking by a large patch in bloom and I smelled a most heavenly odor. Knowing that I sometimes assume flowers don't have fragrance when they do (I was totally shocked by my first fragrant rhododendron), I bent down and inhaled. Quite a nice fragrance--it reminded me a bit of grape jelly.

But on a later walk, when I decided to validate my findings, I couldn't discern any scent at all. I wondered if this was one of those flowers that is fragrant only before it's pollinated and then loses its scent.

And during a quick search of the web today, before posting this entry, I found various descriptions of its smell, all contradictory. There are many entries which claim its fragrant, without describing the fragrance. One post said it smelled like vanilla. Another just said it smelled "divine." That was it for the positive associations.

Plants for the Future has a reference to it as smelling like perspiration. One gardener at Dave's garden complained that the cut flowers smelled like "cat pee." Web sites describing the flowers blooming wild in England said the smell was "doggy," as in "stale dog dung" or "catty."

I know that true valerian (the one that does have herbal properties) has such an unpleasant odor that early herbalists, Discorides and Galen, named it Phu. At least that's what Mrs. Grieves reports in her herbal. And the two valerians are in the same family.

What's going on? What does red valerian really smell like? I'm going out to smell some right now. If you have some in your neighborhood, please check it out and let me know what you think?

The photo came from the Washington State University site.

Flower Child

When I first decided to tackle the topic of flowers, I actually thought of flowers as a separate species, as in there are trees, plants and flowers.
It took a while before I realized that flowers are simply a stage in the life cycle of every plant, at least, all of the angiosperms. Trees have flowers. Right now in Seattle, the lindens are about to burst into bloom. The horse chestnuts are sporting the delightful red and white blossoms known as candles. And the laburnums have shed their petals, as have the locusts. Grasses also have flowers, although we rarely see them because they’re so small and fine. The fuzzy pussy willow buds that I wrote about in March are flowers, as are the catkins dangling from the birches and the alders.
All flowers exist to flirt, to lure the pollinators that will fertilize the ovules and swell into fruit and disperse the seed. And all flowers are transitory, existing only for a brief interval in the life of the plant. Lucky for me there is a far wider time range for blossoming than I imagined when I started my flower project. Now I know that I can find blossoms year round, like the curving yellow threads of the witch hazel in January.
The photo of a wisteria blossom was taken by my friend Michael McIntosh at Schreiner's Iris Farm in May 2008.

Sunlight Through Green Leaves

All last week I kept trying to capture on film the effect of sunlight seen through the new green leaves of summer. Then I heard this Basho poem and realized he had captured this perfectly in words:

Speechless before
These budding green spring leaves
In blazing sunlight
Basho, A Voyage to the Interior
Translated by Sam Hamill

Enfleurage

In my last post, where I featured Octavian’s suggestions for reproducing the smell of wisteria, I forgot to mention that it’s necessary to reproduce the scent of wisteria because it’s one of those flowers whose scent cannot be extracted directly. Many of my favorite fragrant flowers fall in this category: lily of the valley, gardenia, tuberose, jasmine, lilac, iris and wisteria. These fragile flowers crumple when exposed to the heat of the steam which is used to distill scent from other hardier flowers (like lavender and rose).

Of course, this didn’t stop people who wanted to capture the scent of these flowers from developing a method to do so. It’s been around since ancient times and it’s called enfleurage, a name which is actually much prettier than the process.

In its most developed form, as practiced in Grasse, the perfume center of France, during the nineteenth century, fresh flower petals are placed on panes of glass which are smeared with purified fat. The fat absorbs the odors of the flowers, which are replenished when they are spent, until the fat is thoroughly imbued with fragrance. Then the scented fat, which is called a pomade, is washed with alcohol which absorbs the scent. The leftover scented fat was often used to make soap. The scented alcohol is called an absolute. If the alcohol is allowed to evaporate, what is left is an essential oil.

There are more primitive ways of creating the same effect, including simply stirring flowers into hot fat until it absorbs their odors. This cheerful article at Mother Earth News explains how to do enfleurage in your kitchen. I’m not sure I agree that you can use rubbing alcohol; I believe my Natural Perfumery teacher (Jeanne Rose) would shudder at this, because rubbing alcohol has a strong odor of its own which would affect your end result.

The illustration of women handling the chassis used in the enfleurage process comes from Sacred Earth which also explains the process, along with other methods used to extract scent from flowers.

The Scent of Wisteria

I've been working on a series of essays for the past year about my experiences getting to know the flowers that flourish along the eight blocks I walk between my apartment on the top of Capitol Hill in Seattle and my work at Richard Hugo House, at the corner of Pine and Eleventh. I assigned myself a series of tasks, one per month (I love being a teacher and I love being a student). My task for June is to figure out how to capture the scent of flowers. So I plan to post entries on my experiments and let you know how they are going.

Tonight as I walked home on a sunny summer evening I was noticing the scent of wisteria. To me it has a pleasant, creamy vanilla scent. So I was pleased when I went searching online to see that Octavian, one of my favorite perfume writers (I know him from his comments on Luca Turin's perfume blog) has written an entry at his own blog, 1000 Perfumes, carefully analyzing the scent of wisteria with much more precision than my nose can register.

I hadn't considered the difference color might make in the scent of a wisteria until I read Octavian's entry (though I know from much experimentation that I love the smell of purple irises more than any other color). All of the wisteria on my walk was purple.

A few years ago, when I was learning about wine (in the process of researching a wine mystery novel which never got written), I developed much more discrimination in my ability to identify flavors and scents. As I learn about scents, I am trying to increase my scent vocabulary as well. (Oddly enough many of the scents I encountered today reminded me of banana (and I love the scent of banana, especially artificial banana flavor. I don't know what caused this olfactory delusion.)

What does wisteria smell like to you?

Osoberry

One of my friends asked me about the plants at Hedgebrook and I had to laugh because I spent a good amount of time in my cottage writing about plants and not so much walking around in the woods and meadow and garden. Finally one sunny afternoon I grabbed my favorite plant identification book, Wild Plants of Seattle by Arthur Lee Jacobson, and went for a walk in the woods.

There are people who walk through a museum reading the captions and then stepping back and looking at the pictures, and people who just look at the pictures and let them soak in. I have to admit I am one of the former. Likewise there are people who walk through the woods, thumbing through the pages of a book trying to identify plants and people who just commune with the plants. Guess which one I am? Actually I had a good excuse. I was working on an essay about identifying plants.


I didn’t get too far into the woods because I was struck when I walked into a nearby clearing by a plant I had never seen before. It seemed to be alight in the dimness of the woods, all the leaves lifting straight up towards the sky like bright-green candles. I was able to identify it because Jacobson captured this quality in his description of the plant: “as the young green leaves awaken, they illuminate the woods with tender fresh greenery.” The photograph taken by Alyss in Portland really captures this quality. The leaves have the delightful smell and flavor of bitter cucumber.

This deciduous shrub is an osoberry, so named because bears (oso is the Spanish word for bear—I know that from going to Camp Osito as a Girl Scout) like the berries. Jacobson also gives alternate names as Indian Plum or Cherry, Squaw Plum , Bird Cherry and Skunk Bush. The scientific name is Oelemeria cerasiformis and it’s a member of the rose family (as are plums and cherries).

The common names refer to the fruit: bluish-black berries which are favorites of the birds. Jacobson says they are “juicy and melon-flavored [but] marred by a bitter tinge and big pits.” The name Skunk Bush (I assume) comes from the stinky flowers. I brought just one spray into my cottage to sketch and quickly regretted it. The flowers are delicate looking, tiny packages of petals held on drooping stems, almost like lilies of the valley, with raggedy edges but they have a terrible smell.

Every time I learn about a new plant, I fall in love with it and osoberry is my new emblem of spring.