Rose Oil

I tried last summer for the first time to make a rose oil. I knew it would be very small, as I didn't have many fragrant roses to use.. I had two stupendously large and fragrant and velvety blooms from my Etoile de Holland, which had only been a cutting six months earlier and I had the flowers from my wild rose - it would put one out for me every couple of days, but it was still getting its feet in, having been transplanted to the new garden fairly recently too.

Well, this year I have an abundance of roses, hurrah! You know, though, I couldn't pick the Etoile de Holland blooms, about 10 this year. It flowered early while we were enjoying warm weather (seems like a while ago now, huh?) and I enjoyed seeing it from the house so much and smelling its fragrance filling the warm still air out in the garden that I couldn't do it. Mum-in-law tells me that I may be able to get it to do a second flowering later in the year .. I shall feed it and talk to it and see.

However, my old friend the wild rose is now a veritable bush .. this summer it is just flowering and flowering and there are always more buds coming, it seems. And the flowers are sweetly fragrant. The only problem with picking them is that they always have a bee or hoverfly inside... and I should point out here that I always leave plenty of flowers for the bees when I gather them to use.

So how do you make rose oil.. well you just stick the (dry) petals in a little jar, cover them with oil and sit the jar in the sun. I use sunflower oil, as it doesn't have much smell and the rose fragrance can be easily overpowered by stronger smelling oils. Put your jar on some kitchen roll because it will ooze however careful you are. The idea is that you leave the petals in the oil to infuse in the sun. When all the colour has gone from the petals you can carefully strain the oil, ringing all the oil from the spent petals using a muslin or coffee filter paper, then return to the jar with new petals. I just keep adding petals to the jar each day till its full then wait. The main problem is getting enough sunshine! I have a very sunny southfacing windowsill (which happily grows tomatoes and sunflowers) so I am hoping for the best, but the weather will have to start playing ball at some point if it is to work! It will take months and months, but I think it will be worth it.

Last year I only achieved a very slightly scented oil, due to a lack of sufficient roses over the whole season. I made it into little pots of rose lipbalm, and the rose fragrance was so ephemeral as to barely be there .. sometimes I thought I was just remembering it or smelling it with the 'nose of faith'! But it so much better than using essential oil, which is desperately expensive in any case. Will let you know how this year's turns out.

I have read about making rose oil in a number of different places, all outlining the same basic method, but it is included in 'Herbal Remedies: A practical beginner's guide fo making effective remedies in the kitchen' by Christopher Hedley and Non Shaw, which I can't recommend highly enough if you want a good guide to making infused oils and salves at home. Its what I used when I started on my herbal adventures and has good clear instructions with plenty of photos.

Or, if you love all things historical, like me, you might like to read the Anglo-Saxon version, (translated) from the Lacnunga manuscript dating to around 1000AD:

'For rose oil, make it thus: one pound of oil, one ounce of mature rose flower; mix together in a glass jar under gypsum and hang in the sun for 40 days so its power may be styptic and cooling; use it for many illnesses, mostly for pain in the head ... that is emigraneum'

This is taken from 'Leechcraft: Early English Charms, Plantlore and Healing' by Stephen Pollington, which I was thumbing through researching for something else entirely when this rose oil entry jumped out and took me by surprise. Imagine my delight (especially as a migraine sufferer!)

Rose

This rose is an old friend.. we go back a long way! I was only a child when I planted the seed. It was one of those little kits you can get, you know a cardboard box with a pretty picture on the outside and inside is a plant pot, a seed and a little plastic bag of compost. I remember doing it! I can picture it now, in the back garden of the house where I grew up. I guess I must have watered it and it must have germinated and started to grow - I don't remember more than that.

It was left to its own devices. It must have just steadily got on with it. Years passed. Its existence was entirely forgotten by me. I left home. I moved about. Unbeknown to me, it had a custodian - my Dad. He didn't water it, he didn't check to see if it needed anything. But he didn't throw it away. And when my parents moved house, leaving London for Norwich, he must have taken it with them. Because when I was in my 30s, he said to me one day something along the lines of 'I've still got that grotty old rose of yours' (or words to that effect!). 'What old rose - you can't possibly mean that little shrub rose I tried to grow as a child?'

And it turns out that Dad had just parked it down the side of his shed and it just kept quietly growing. He brought it for me when I moved into the flat in Tottenham with my partner (now my husband). And so it passed to a new custodian, for my partner made and cherished a beautiful garden-against-the-odds outside the flat down the side of an unpromising alley and carpark. And he asked if he could put it into the ground. I said, well I think it really deserves it - I can't believe that its survived all this time in a pot! So after several decades of hanging on, the rose finally got its feet into the earth. And it was loved and tended and watered .. and for the very first time ever, it flowered. It survived the Tottenham carpark and thrived.

When we moved to Essex two years back now, we brought it with us and now I have it in my garden. Its very happy here and it has such a special significance for me.

It links me with my childhood self, with my childhood home, with my Dad who kept it for my sake, with my husband who nurtured it and got it to flower for me.. and planting it in the garden here makes me feel loved and somehow 'rooted' in my new home. Like something has turned full circle .. we were both seedlings together and thanks to the support of important people along the way, we are now in full bloom (or something like that!).

Scent

Hello all! I've been blown away these last few days by scent.. and I've been thinking about it a lot. You know, essential oils are great and everything, but its not the same. So what triggered all this? Well several things simultaneously: the boys came back from Nanny's house with a bunch of lily of the valley for me - what a treat! It has been scenting the bedroom, so that when you open the door you get a great waft of aroma .. and if you lie down and relax and breath it in can transport you to paradise.

Then, yesterday, at the end of a tired and rather fraught day with the little'un, when he'd finally been beaten by bedtime, and mummy still had the chore of heading back out into the garden and righting the havoc he'd been wreaking all afternoon, an amazing gift - opening the shed door and so creating a slight breeze, the wisteria sang to me. It just kind of rustled its leaves in the breeze and a shower of lilac petals spiralled down onto the grass around me and it enveloped me in perfume. I knew it smelt good, as you can smell it during the daytime, but I don't usually venture outside in the evening and was totally unprepared for its heady power. It just took every ounce of tension and stress right out of my body and blew it away on the breeze. Wow. Embraced by a plant!

And today, a moment of unalloyed bliss. My absolute top favourite all-time obsessive plant love is a rose which my mum-in-law (the same lovely lady who sends back bunches of lily of the valley, aren't I lucky?) grows. The perfume is exotic and heavy and druglike (ie. addictive!) She used to always send me back a bloom or two when we lived in Tottenham, and once we landed in Essex she gave me the gift of a cutting for my new herb garden. It thrives there, and in its first year, last year, it had two phenomenal blooms. It has grown massively in the year since and is all set to do its thing now .. today the first of 7 or 8 burgeoning buds burst into full bloom. I knew it was there, I watched it start to unfurl yesterday evening and open up gradually all morning out the window, and when I got back from dropping little'un at nursery for the afternoon the first thing I did was to head over and i.n.h.a.l.e... exquisite, just a personal moment of bliss.

It will be gone tomorrow, as its so hot out there this afternoon that the show will be over and it will drop its petals (I will be standing by to catch them). But its moments like that which sustain you through all the ordinary, uncomfortable or just less-than-satisfactory parts of life, don't you think?

Now that's aromatherapy!

Rosehips and Ice

Beautiful freezing (literally!) morning and a walk along Alresford Creek, about 3 miles from home. No-one about, really peaceful and the air was full of birdsong. Stopped to listen to a robin singing to us from his perch up in a bush just a few feet away, such a beautiful sight and song.

Little'un loved the new game of cracking the ice where the muddy puddles had frozen over (there is no better fun than muddy puddles when you are nearly 3, and this was a whole new take on them!)

Collected just a few rosehips and took photos so I can try to identify the type, having been inspired by Moongazing Hare's interesting wild rose post. Am determined to start learning these things! There were several rose bushes which all appeared to be the same and towered high over my head with the reddest plumpest fruits right at the top out of reach.

The hips are about 2cm long and the bushes had backward facing hook-shaped thorns. I am wondering whether this makes them rosa rubiginosa, as many of the hips appear egg-shaped and the bushes had red-tinted stems?

Colour

Picked a big splash of colour for the kitchen table yesterday ... not bad for November?

Calendula

Cerise Queen

A rose we inherited with the house .. it has no fragrance, but the blooms are beautiful as a cut flower.