Flower of March: Daffodil

Daffadowndilly has come to town
In a yellow petticoat and a green gown.

I always think of the daffodil as the flower for the month of March. That’s because I always look for the daffodils on the first of March, and for the past ten years, with one exception, I have always found them in bloom by this date in Seattle.  Lucky for me since I want to wear a daffodil on March 1st  to show my allegiance to Wales (thanks to my ancestress, Nesta, the mother of the first Fitzgerald, who flourished around 1100).

The daffodil is the national flower of Wales which is why you should wear it on March 1, the feast day of St. David, the patron saint of Wales. Or you can eat a leek on this day and become an honorary Welshman (Cymru as the Welsh would say it). I try to do both.

The David Morgan site in its entry for St David’s Day
http://www.davidmorgan.com/stdavid.html
implies that the daffodil was imposed as a symbol of Wales by the English who wanted to downplay the political implications of the leek (worn by wild Welshmen in battle with the Saxons). Julie Ardery’s article at the wonderful Human Flower Project web site
http://humanflowerproject.com/index.php/weblog/comments/the_leek_and_the_daffodil/
mentions David Lloyd George, the Prime Minister of Britain during World War I, as the person who popularized this custom but he was Welsh himself so it seems more likely he was bringing to the forefront an authentic Welsh custom. The creators of the French Revolutionary calendar must have known of the association of the daffodil with St David’s Day back in 1792 when they designed the calendar and assigned the “narcisse” to March 1 (the 11th day of Ventose, or Windy). (The daffodil appears later in March on the 8th of Germinal)

Daffodil is a common name for a narcissus. It may be derived from the plant name asphodel, known to the Romans. Pliny wrote that it grew on the banks of the Acheron, delighting the spirits of the dead. The Romans planted it on tombs, perhaps because it was said to grow in the Elysian Fields. It was the sight of a daffodil that lured Persephone into the Underworld.

Perhaps it is the way they droop that evokes death. It also gave rise to the myth of the beautiful boy, Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection. I will let my favorite garden writer, Paghat, tell you all about the Narcissus myth and the secret rites of Echo practiced during the Eleusinian mysteries
http://www.paghat.com/narcissusmyth1.html

The narcissus common in Greece, Narcissus tazetta, is called Little Tear Drops. In Germany, daffodils are called Osterglocken, Easter bells. They are also called Lent Lilies in England. They are favorite decorations for Easter tables, for Nawruz (Persian new year) celebrations and for Chinese New Year.

Gabi Grieve of the World Kigo database
http://europasaijiki.blogspot.com/2005/04/daffodil-and-narcissus.html
mentions a new holiday in Ireland, Daffodil Day, March 24 which is sponsored by the Irish Cancer Society. Resonating as it does with connotations of both death and hope, the daffodil is used as a symbol by cancer societies around the world.

All daffodils have a central trumpet-shaped corona surrounded by a ring of petals. The traditional color is yellow but hybridizers have bred all sorts of fanciful variations, including daffodils with multiple layers of petals or frilled petals and daffodils with contrasting coronas and petals, or elongated or compressed coronas.

Daffodils come from the Mediterranean but there is one particular daffodil, Narcissus obvallaris, which grows only in a small area around Tenby in Wales. The Narcissus pseudonarcissus is also native to Wales. Julie Ardery writes about the way the winter daffodils bloom in January at Quarrelton in Wales, possibly due to the fires still smoldering beneath the surface in the abandoned tunnels of the mines there:
http://humanflowerproject.com/index.php/weblog/comments/daffodils_for_the_miners/
She also describes how Welsh scientists are cultivating daffodils because they contain galanthamine, which is used in the treatment of Alzheimers.
http://humanflowerproject.com/index.php/weblog/comments/the_mind_of_a_daffodil/

However don’t try this at home. Daffodil bulbs are poisonous. Mrs. Grieve says they are a powerful emetic. Even the flowers are slightly poisonous. However, both bulbs and petals have been used medicinally. The Arabs used an oil of daffodil to cure baldness and as an aphrodisiac.

The oil of Narcissus jonquilla and Narcissus Campernella are used to make a sweet-smelling oil used in perfumes, but Mrs. Grieve warns against being in a closed room as the Narcissus poeticus, or Poet’s Narcissus, as the scent of these daffodils has been known to cause headache and vomiting.

The daffodil is also called the goose leek. In the Isle of Man it is considered unlucky to bring them into the house until the goslings are hatched. In Maine, they say that if you point at a daffodil it will not bloom. And in Wales, if you find the first bloom of the season, you will have more gold than silver this year.

May you find the first bloom of the season.

References:
Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daffodil
Mrs. Grieve’s Modern Herbal:
http://www.botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/n/narcis01.html
Leach, Maria, editor, Funk & Wagnall’s Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend, Harper & Row 1972

Marigold: Flower of November

Many observers mention the bright yellow flower used as an offering on graves on altars and graves in Mexico on Day of the Dead. Sometimes it is called a marigold, the Tzeltals call it tusus and Brenner writes about the pungent, yellow cempoalxochitl. As with bird names, flower names are often difficult to translate, so it’s possible all three of these are the same flower.

Marigolds have confusing names. Tagetes erecta is the most common variety, and is known as the African marigold, though it is not native to Africa. Tagetes patula is called the French marigold, though it’s not native to France. Tagetes lucida is known in Mexico as Pericon. It is used to make a sweet, licorice-flavored tea.

It also appears under the names of Spanish tarragon and Mexican mint marigold. Then there’s tagetes minuta, also known as Mexican marigold, which, according to Wikipedia, is an important culinary herb with a flavor like a mixture of sweet basil, tarragon, mint and citrus.

Tagetes patula (French marigold)

In Europe, the flower was named in honor of the Virgin Mary: Mary’s gold. (The calendula is also called a marigold, or sometimes, a pot marigold.) Although the genus name, tagetes, is often derived from an Etruscan prophet, Tages, that seems unlikely. This is a New World plant which first appears in 16th century European herbals under the name, tagetes, which may derive from tanacetum, as it has the same strong odor as tansy.

The marigold—one species is called tagetes azteca–was brought to Europe by Portugese explorers who found it growing wild in Brazil in the sixteenth century. The flower was sacred to the Aztecs who used it to decorate shrines and temples. It was sometimes used as a symbol of the Spanish conquest, the red stains on the yellow blossoms representing the blood shed by the Spanish. It was also called flor de muerto, the flower of death.

Friar Duran writing about the Aztec culture described a festival called Farewell to Flowers, celebrated before the first frost:

Among the most solemn feasts was the one called Farewell to the Flowers, which meant that frost was coming and flowers would wither and dry up. A solemn festivity, filled with rejoicing and merrymaking, was held to bid them farewell. On that same day they commemorated a goddess named Xochiquetzalli, which means “Flowery Plumage.”

On this day they were as happy as could be, the same happiness and delight they feel today on smelling any kind of flower, whether it have an agreeable or a displeasing scent, as long as it is a flower. They become the happiest people in the world smelling them, for these natives in general are most sensuous and pleasure-loving. They find gladness and joy in spending the entire day smelling a little flower or a bouquet made of different kinds of flowers; their gifts are accompanied by them; they relieve the tediousness of journeys with flowers. To sum up, they find the smelling of flowers so comforting that they even stave off and manage to survive hunger by smelling them. Thus they passed their lives among flowers in such blindness and darkness, since they had been deceived and persuaded by the devil, who had observed their love for blossoms and flowers. . .

On this day their persons, temples, houses and streets were adorned with flowers. . . . Thus decorated with flowers, they engaged in different dances, merrymaking, festivities, and farces, all filled with gladness and good cheer. All this was in honor of and reverence for flowers. This day was called Xochilhuitl, which means “Feast of the Flowers,” and no other finery-gold, silver, stones, feathers-was worn on this day-only flowers. Besides being the day of the flowers it was the day of a goddess, who, as I have said, was called Xochiquetzal. This goddess was the patroness of painters, embroiderers, weavers, silversmiths, sculptors, and all those whose profession it was to imitate nature in crafts and in drawing. All held this goddess to be their patroness, and her feast was specially solemnized by them. . . (238)

[This selection was translated by John Curl and found at the web site of the Foundation for the Advancement of Meso-American Studies.]

The Portugese took the flower to India where it soon became a sacred flower in Hindu worship. It is grown in great quantities in India and Thailand and used in garlands for rituals, weddings and festivals. You can see the garlands ornamenting cars, carts and tools during the Dussera festival in India in this article at Julie Ardery’s wonderful site, Human Flower Project, where you can also read a great article by Jill Nokes about her journey on the trail of Zempasuchitl.

Marigold flowers can be dried and added to scrambled eggs or other egg and cheese dishes. In Mexico, the dried flower heads are fed to chickens because they add color to the flesh of the chickens who eat them and to the yolks of the eggs they produce.  The flower petals also produce a yellow dye.

The marigold is a great companion plant in the garden. Both the odor of the leaves and chemicals in the root keep away pests. The smell of linalool found in marigolds (and lavender and sweet peas) has been shown to reduce stress.

One of my favorite sources for garden plants, Mountain Valley Growers, sells several unusual varieties of marigold and provides thorough descriptions of them, including the results of a taste test between French marigold and Spanish marigold.

If you want seeds instead, go to this article (also at the fabulous Human Flower Project web site) about marigold missionary, David Moffitt, who gives away thousands of marigold seeds away if you send him a self-addressed stamped envelope.

In the language of the flowers, marigolds have unfortunate meanings. African marigolds mean “vulgar minds” and French marigolds mean “jealousy.”

References:
Greenaway, Kate, Language of Flowers
Kaplan, Lawrence, “Historical and Ethnobotanical Aspects of Domestication in Tagetes,” adapted from a paper presented at the IX International Botanical Congress at Montreal, August 28, 1959

Capturing the Scent of a Flower

(Photo by Mary Kirman)

By Waverly Fitzgerald

October 2008. Legendary herbalist Jeanne Rose sat perched on a stool in the workroom of a perfume shop in the mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles on a Sunday morning. In front of her were ten little brown vials full of perfume, concocted by the students in her Natural Perfumery class the day before. She picked them up, one by one, unscrewed the lids, waved them back and forth under her nose, eyes closed.

“Some of these scents are nice,” she said. “Some are good.” She paused. “And some of these scents have the potential to be spectacular.”

I sat with the other nine women in the class, in a semi-circle. Each of us was properly attired, as instructed, in a white shirt or apron.  We ranged in age from early twenties to late fifties and included a script reader for a major studio, an aromatherapy teacher, a physician who specializes in fertility, the editor of a glossy food magazine, a student of acupuncture. I had come the farthest, all the way from Seattle, for this class.

I had not really intended to become a perfumer. This Natural Perfumery class was simply one of the many tasks I tackled in my quest to figure out how to capture the scent of flowers. I was more interested in the materials we had used-the essential oils, the absolutes, the waxes in the glass vials on the shelves around us-and how they were extracted from flowers. But at that moment, as we waited for Jeanne’s opinions, I dared to hope that my perfume was one of the spectacular ones.

I signed up for the class because I wanted to study with Jeanne Rose. She has been one of my heroines ever since I bought her first book, Herbs ‘n Things, shortly after it was published in 1971. Jeanne wrote it in the Sixties when she was a young woman with long dark hair and big dark eyes, living a block off Haight Ashbury in San Francisco, dressing rock stars in fringed suede jackets and bell-bottoms. She had compiled the information in the book from old herbals and some of the information seems unlikely or impossible (fennel seed boiled in wine and drunk for serpent bites?) but fascinating.

By 2008, Jeanne Rose had acquired over forty years of experience, growing, creating and selling herbal products and teaching classes. Her recent books, and the workbooks we purchased as texts for the class, are rich with information, based on her personal experience and her reading of scientific literature.

The other reason I had chosen this class was because I wanted to know how to make perfume from flowers. And a class in Natural Perfumery seemed the obvious place to learn. I was so naive I didn’t realize there is a difference between the scent of flowers and perfumes, which are artfully composed from many different elements including spices, citrus peel, woods, mosses, even seashells. I also didn’t understand the significance of the word Natural or that I had taken sides in a battle I didn’t even know was being waged, a battle between perfumers and natural perfumers.

The class was held in a perfume shop, Blunda Aromatics, in the mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles and the proprietor, Persephenie, is one of the rising stars in the field of natural perfumery. She sponsors events at her store that showcase other natural perfumers and the descriptions of these events make me wish I lived in LA instead of Seattle so I could attend and smell the fragrances.

On the other side are perfumers, like Luca Turin, my favorite perfume writer, who has only contempt for natural perfumers. Like most professionals in the field of perfume, he can’t understand why anyone would limit themselves to scents that can be extracted from natural ingredients, eschewing the marvelous fragrances that can be created in the laboratory. Turin is a chemist, as well as a scientist who has pioneered a new theory about how we smell, and he sometimes works for perfume companies, in the lab, creating new scent molecules or aromachemicals.

The main difference between synthetic perfume molecules and natural scents is that natural scents are more complex. Chandler Burr in his book The Perfect Scent, reproduces the results from a chemical analysis of a Turkish rose absolute (a solid waxy substance in which the flowers have been embedded). He lists 81 molecules, but the total list would contain between 800 and 1,000 different molecules. That’s how complex the scent of a rose is.

Some of the scents in a rose include citronellol, geraniol, nerol, nonadecane, eugenol, PEA, linalool, henicosane, alpha-pinene. You may recognize some of these molecules as they are named after the substances from which they are derived. Citron (think citrus blossom, not the fruit), geranium, neroli (another citrus flower), pine. Some  you might not recognize by name but you would by scent: eugenol is the spicy chemical that is found in basil leaves and cloves; linalool is a major aroma chemical in lavender. And those are just the scents that contribute over 1% of the total odor.

Perfume chemists have isolated some of the aromachemicals that are responsible for the scent of a rose, like damascone and damascenone, named after the aromatic damask rose. Luca Turin, scientist and perfume reviewer, says these molecules remind him of Brahms and autumn. He writes they are “outrageously fruity, and convey the full range of dried-fruit notes, all shades of translucent golden browns.”

Although I was disappointed in my quest to learn how to capture the scent of flowers, I did get plenty of  hands-on experience with a variety of perfume materials. Jeanne brought along 72 essential oils, waxes and absolutes for us to smell.

These were lined up in little bottles and jars along the long wooden workbench on one side of the workroom. In a wavering row, all of the students in the class shuffled along the length of the counter, picking up each bottle and taking a quick sniff. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences well worth the cost of the whole workshop. Some of those bottles would cost hundreds of dollars to replace. Others were 40 years old, like the styrax resin, and couldn’t be duplicated today.

Each of these materials is created in a different way. And when you learn about the methods of extracting scent from flowers, you realize there is nothing very natural about it.

In steam distillation, steam is driven through the plant materials, which release their aromatic oils. The vapor that ascends contains the essential oil and water. It moved through a cooling tube into another chamber, called the condensing chamber, where the oil, because it is lighter than water will float on the top. It can be skimmed from the surface and bottled.

The fragrant water can also be collected and saved. For years, the only two flower waters that were precious enough to be bottled and saved were rose water and orange blossom water.  Jeanne Rose was the first to advocate saving this byproduct of the distillation process which she named a hydrosol. Now you can buy hydrosols of lavender, and bay, and oregano. I have all of those in my refrigerator right now.

Jeanne Rose has been distilling her own essential oils for years, using a copper still in her backyard. She also sponsors an Aromatic Plant Project which encourages wine growers in California to grow fragrant plants like lavender alongside their vines and harvest the crop for steam distillation.

I have not yet become enthralled enough to purchase my own still but I did learn how to create a kitchen still in an herbal medicine class and used that to create my first hydrosol.

I used bay leaves from the tree in my garden. I put the leaves in water in a non-reactive pan, put a metal steamer on top of them, and centered a glass bowl in the middle of the steamer. Then I covered the pot with an upside down glass lid and put a plastic bag of ice on top of that. Then I put the pot on the stove and turned up the heat. The vapors from the leaves were released as steam, rose to the top of the pan, condensed when they hit the cold surface of the lid, rolled down to the inverted knob and dripped down into the glass bowl. The kitchen filled with a wonderful fragrance, evoking bay rum and eucalyptus. I removed the glass bowl containing the liquid gingerly after turning off the heat and let everything cool down.

My hydrosol of bay was delightful-spicy and warm. It contains (I learned from Wikipedia) eugenol, the same chemical component I love in cloves (and used to love in clove cigarettes) and eucalyptol, the main ingredient in eucalyptus, the remedy my mother used (a drop of eucalyptus oil on a piece of cotton in a steamer) for childhood coughs.

Flushed with success, I then attempted a rose hydrosol, using petals from the scented rose across the street. It smelled delicious steaming in the pot but the end result was a brownish liquid that smelled nothing like roses. It did, however, smell like Brahms and autumn.

Other methods of extracting scent from flowers are more brutal. Perhaps the earliest method used was to soak flowers in fat. The Egyptians wore cones of perfumed oil on their heads which melted, spreading the perfume through their hair.

Many flowers are too fragile to sustain steam distillation. This includes many of my favorites: wisteria, lilac, lily of the valley, gardenia, jasmine, honeysuckle. The method used to capture the scent of these flowers is called enfleurage, a term much too pretty for the method itself.

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. This old illustration of women working with the chassis (the glass frames) comes from Sacred Earth which also features a great article on methods used to extract scents from plant materials.

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, by placing flowers in fat, then using rubbing alcohol as a solvent to extract the scent from the fat. I’m sure Jeanne Rose would shudder at this suggestion, because rubbing alcohol has a strong odor of its own which would affect your end result.

I am currently trying this home version of enfleurage but have not achieved very impressive results. I used Crisco (not being enough of a purist to want to clarify lard as the author of the article suggests) and spread it over the sides of two small tea saucers. I then placed petals of the jasmine that twines around the pillar of my front porch in the fat on both sides and clamped the two saucers together with a rubber band.

I check every few days to see if the flowers are spent (it seems to take about three days before they turn brown), then pluck them off and replace them with fresh flowers. The fat is beginning to take on an odor but it’s not entirely pleasant. I think I left some of the flowers too long and they began to mold.

I was more successful with an even more primitive method I tried when the woodruff was at its peak in late April. I put some sprigs of woodruff in a small bottle of jojoba oil and pulled out the limp stems every week and replaced them for three weeks in a row. The oil now has the marvelous smoky, almost tobacco-like scent of woodruff. I’m not quite sure what I can do with it. I may use it as a base and add an essential oil to make a perfumed cream.

Jeanne Rose in her books mentions several other forms of primitive distillation, for instance, hanging scented flowers in a corked bottle in the sun. She says the oils will drop to the bottom of the bottle and you can collect them. I tried this but my plant materials simply molded.

I have not achieved much success in capturing the scent of the flowers in my neighborhood, but perhaps I was more successful as a perfumer? Alas! My perfume was not one of the spectacular ones created in the Natural Perfumery workshop. But I can’t think of anything really more marvelous than spending two days playing around with scents.

I have come to terms with the idea that fragrance is by its very nature transient. My favorite perfume (Clinique Simply) is no longer available. My new favorite (Mimosa Pour Moi) evaporates from my skin as I wear it. The aroma of roses perfumes the summer air but is gone by autumn. I am learning to enjoy the scents of the moment.

Do you have a method for capturing and preserving the  scent of flowers?