On April 26th 2016 I stood in an orange grove in Cyprus surrounded by leathery leaved trees simultaneously bearing buds, blossom, tiny fruit and ripe bitter oranges all ready for picking. At my feet sat a huge basket reserved for picking blossom. It was hot and the air shimmered with heat, even the bees were moving slowly, drunk on the nectar and pacified by the sun. Four hours and numerous juicy oranges later, the basket was full to overflowing with carefully selected blossom, so scented that it made me heady with delight.
A significant part of my work is distilling and it is an utter pleasure. I have 5 Stills of varying sizes in Harris and very decadently, I keep a large hand-beaten copper Alembic Still in Cyprus too, especially for orange blossom and Neroli oil distilling. It’s rare to find an occupation so delightful, but for me, distilling is exactly that. It’s a journey into unexpected scent, an alchemical adventure where the prize is a flower water and essential oil so fresh and perfect that it can take my breath away.
The Isle Mist, much beloved by all, is the Isle of Harris distilled - Heather, Seaweed, Roses, Bog Myrtle, Pine and other botanicals collected in season and distilled in 3 parts then brought together into a harmonious whole. It quite literally captures the scent of this island.
I lived in Cyprus for many years and when I left it became an annual journey for me, a trip away from the gloom of late winter in the UK and onto a Mediterranean island where scent fills the air from morning until night. In April the Bauhinia trees are in full flower emitting an intoxicatingly sweet scent late into the night, the roses are blossoming and the honeysuckle scrambles over walls rampantly flowering. Our old garden there was always full of fragrance. It is a world away from Harris.
That particular year, in addition to the orange blossom, which provided six litres of astonishingly lovely orange blossom water and a small amount of Neroli oil, I decided to track down Labdanum and Galbanum.
Labdanum is produced from the resin of Cistus creticus a small shrub with pink flowers that unfurl with the appearance of crumpled tissue paper. I remembered seeing a lot of it growing high up in the mountains along a precipitously narrow track punctuated with large potholes, no barrier and definitely no passing places.
Labdanum is my favourite resin, we use it a lot because it's brilliant for the skin, it reduces fine lines, tones, soothes inflammation and protects against sun damage. It also smells incredible. It is a powerfully effective ingredient to use for mature skin. We use it in Face Cream #3 (now renamed Harris Rose & Labdanum Face Cream), the Wild Beauty Balm, the Facial Serum and the Cleansing Oil.
I did my research and discovered that the traditional way of harvesting it was to drive goats back and forth through it – the action of grazing it causes the plant to release the resin as a milky coloured sticky sap which sticks to the goat’s beards and hind leg hair. Once sufficiently resin coated, the goat’s hair would be combed and the Labdanum collected.
The alternative technique is to make a Ladanistirio – a wooden rake with long leather threads, which the resin sticks to. Once dry the Labdanum is scraped off.
Full of enthusiasm I pocketed a rather nifty nit comb, ready for an impromptu harvest at a moment’s notice should a herd of goats pass by. As a back up plan I decided to make a Ladanistirio, which proved harder than it looked. After much trial and error I settled for an old broom with thick washing line tied to it - leather strands being in rather short supply.
The journey up into the mountains was punctuated by shouts of ‘Stop! there goes a goat’. I now know that whilst catching up with goats is relatively easy, combing them is almost impossible. After numerous attempts and several discussions with goat herders who actually thought I had lost all reason, I decided that I would go for the rake option.
Upwards we wound, through olive groves, past wild sage, thyme and oregano until we reached the place where the hillside was literally covered in Cistus. The plants jostled with each other for space, with pink flowers in various stages of unfurled crumple. The plant stem is dark brown and hairy with narrowish mid green leaves that feel sticky to the touch. In such an inhospitable climate the plants are tough, they survive with tiny amounts of water and set seed between rocks on desperately thin soil.
I leapt out of the car, clutching hat and improvised ladanistirio, had a quick look around for snakes and made for the nearest clump. What followed was neither elegant nor effective – 20 minutes of thrashing around with an old broom with strings of chopped up washing line tied to it. On a purely practical level I can definitively reveal that washing line is a poor substitute for leather. Most importantly when in ‘mid- lash’ the strands fly off the broom and knot themselves up with all the other strings. As a ladanistirio designer/maker I am an abject failure. However I did examine the plants I had lashed and sure enough there were small white beads of resin that smelt heavenly. My harvest comprised a small pea of Labdanum resin but I still have plans make a proper ladanistirio and return a lot older and a little wiser.
The Galbanum was rather less energetic and more successful – Galbanum is collected from the base of the giant fennel (Ferula gummosa), a fantastic stately plant with impressive umbels of yellow flowers held aloft a thick, hollow stem. In Cyprus the stems are sometimes used as torches and when the plant dies back there are always Pleurotus ferulae mushrooms to harvest. Making cuts very low down the stem on a few of the plants revealed a very sticky sap that collected over about 24 hours. I scraped it off the lower stem just above the roots and put it into a dish to harden. It was quite a struggle given that ants are drawn to the sap and they gathered in little collectives to make off with the resin. Once collected it sat for a while in a jar waiting for phase two of the operation – turning it into a useable substance.
Galbanum with its incredibly 'green' scent forms the key ingredient in the Blemish Resolve Cream. Galbanum is known for its properties as a tonic for mature, oily, and blemish-prone skin because of its antiseptic, anti-inflammatory, and balancing properties. It helps with acne, scars, lines, and hydration by promoting cell renewal and tightening pores. It's also used traditionally for wound healing,
For me, collecting my own ingredients is incredibly important – it makes wandering up mountains, dodging snakes and wading through bogs a part of the journey to delicious, pure scent. I particularly love the freshness and simplicity of the end product that comes from knowing the provenance of almost every flower that has gone into making it. It’s difficult to describe the olfactory pleasure of making flower waters and essential oils, it’s rather like holding a summer’s day in your hands and then transforming it into something you can re-experience all year.
Every plant is different and every distillation reveals a slightly different scent even when the flowers are picked from the same plant only a couple of days apart. Living now in Harris I wait with bated breath for the first Roses to appear in the greenhouse, the effort of picking them and then removing every trace of green to keep the scent pure is nothing compared to the pleasure of sniffing the first drops of the flower water as it drips into the essencier for separation into oil and flower water.
The season is short though and as with any other seasonal product, I pick what I can but when it has gone that’s it for another year. That’s actually part of the pleasure, much as eating strawberries in June is an experience to be savoured and not repeated year round, so it is with distilling. I could dry flowers and distil them throughout the year but somehow the vitality is lost in that process – rehydrating a plant is never as satisfying as waiting for the seasonal glut. A dried flower has lost its volatile oils and its essence, the scent somehow is never as vibrant or complex and the therapeutic value is diminished.
And after all that, the bottles of flower/herb waters sit in dark amber bottles on a special shelf waiting to be turned into beautiful products. The essential oils are carefully labelled and used judiciously in other products alongside others, leaving me to follow the flowers and herbs through the seasons collecting sustainably for yet another journey.