Attar of roses
Written by Francis Rosenfeld
Imagine an open field of roses extending as far as the eyes can see, an eighty mile long garden. Hundreds of thousands of bushels of rose petals get picked, boiled and distilled, and re-distilled, and purified, until out of one thousand pounds of petals five ounces of precious attar of roses are extracted. A perfume so strong that it is too much for a person to bear undiluted.
You can't extract the quintessence of a sunset but you can concentrate scent to its purest form. Every time you take the lid off the little bottle, an eighty mile long rose garden comes out.
For the sake of efficiency we think of attar of roses as just a perfumery ingredient and do not back track all the steps that brought it to be. Somewhere far away though, there is a field of roses getting distilled into a little bottle as we speak.
Article author
About the Author
Main Areas: Garden Writing; Sustainable Gardening; Homegrown Harvestr
Published Books: “Terra Two”; “Generations”, "Letters to Lelia"
Career Focus: Author; Consummate Gardener;
Affiliation: All Year Garden; The Weekly Gardener; Francis Rosenfeld's Blog
I started blogging in 2010, to share the joy of growing all things green and the beauty of the garden through the seasons. Two garden blogs were born: allyeargarden.com and theweeklygardener.com, a periodical that followed it one year later. I wanted to assemble an informal compendium of the things I learned from my grandfather, wonderful books, educational websites, and my own experience, in the hope that other people might use it in their own gardening practice.
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