In flagrante indelicato: Lilacs, a.k.a. the fallacy of sensitive tosh

Lilacs.  Some of you are already well past your season, others can still smell the peak in your nose, even if the actual peak was already days ago.

Here, we're a couple of weeks past the peak of the old-fashioneds, and while Miss Kim is still pumping out a honking snootful of scent today, I have a feeling that this is like when a singer pushes out the last air from the bottom of the diaphragm.  It's big, it's blowsy, but it is no longer fresh, and a little hollow at the heart.

Old fashioned lilac, pumping out the volume 2011

Since Miss Kim is pumping out her final glory, I found myself out gathering armfuls of blooms for the second time this season this morning.  This is a big milestone for me; in the first place, I am conservative when it comes to harvesting blooms.  Not just because I have a sensitive side that feels bad about cutting them, but because I love seeing them in their environment.  I plant with an eye toward how the "composition" looks in situ; in movie terms, it's a botanical mise en scene.  Heck, I'll even spend time deciding if I let a weed have a few days as part of the composition, if texture/color/height fill in the scene nicely and it won't go all Godzilla and take over the area.

But there is a saying about lilacs, which is true:  They like the lopping.  Which is to say, trimming encourages fresh wood (and therefore fresh blooms), keeps the plant looking fully and less "leggy," and also helps manage height/width if that at all matters.  It's not that "they're asking for it"--that saying has always bothered me for a number of reasons--but they do respond well to it.  And, in fact, they thrive as a result.

Furthermore, lilacs stems headed for the vase need a little, well, abuse.  Smashing.  A simple end cut will not allow the woody stems to take up adequate water, and they'll wilt within 24 hours.  Sometimes you can almost watch the depressing withering as if time lapse was accelerated in front of your real time eyes.  I conveniently forgot that with the first round of trimmings.  They were droopy by nightfall.  This time I did not make that error.

My tool of choice was a railroad stake.  Plenty of heft, and the head end provides a pseudo-cutting edge, so that in one fell strike you can smash-slash.  2-3" of gashes up from the bottom of each, and you are good to go.

It's not that they ask for it.  But if you are going to do the trimming, and want them to hang out for a while in the vase, you do need to alter them.  With violent measures.  Because you need to expose cells, and soften tenacious structured material.

This, my friends, is the "wan" lilac.

It is a deceptive shrub.  That fragrance that is so "pretty," that visits but once a year, can actually nearly strangle you.  Our Miss Kim, for example, is right outside a lower floor bathroom window.  Which in some ways was good planning by the previous owner.  Because it offers a lovely screen 3 out of 4 seasons of the year, and is often snow covered enough for privacy effect in the fourth.  Because it is visually attractive.  And because in other areas of the house, and on the back patio, catching a waft can be a pleasant thing.

But if you are in that front bathroom?  On a hot day?  This is a situation the word "cloying" serves well.  Some might even say "suffocating."

This is a clear example of when "fresh air" is not the same as "air heavy with the fragrance of {lilac/fill in your own big stonkin' flower}."

**

So when the topic of En Passant comes up, I am always careful to thank Olivia Giacobetti.  She knew that the best way to experience a lilac was in passing, not in situ.  Certainly not stuck in nostrilo.  And too much of a good thing is, well, too much, so there's that cucumber and that bread and that ghost of Apres L'Ondee.

It's perfect.  As if it were my neighbor growing the lilacs, baking the bread, me slicing the cucumber, me discovering I still had remnants of yesterday's Apres L'Ondee somewhere on me.  (Alas, that that could actually happen in real life...)

I can't wear En Passant when the lilacs are at peak, incidentally.  Too much input.  I am too busy processing and managing the heavy full-throated single relentless note of the lilacs.  Which must be some kind of siren song, come to think of it; all of this noise, and still I gather it into bundles and bring it into my house.

My favorite times to wear En Passant are early spring, when it seems (as it so often does) that it is having trouble revving up, and in the fall, for a kind of nostalgia.  Plus the occasional nostalgic occasion or mood throughout the year.

There are times when the hologram, the reproduction, is just the thing.

*
Hundreds of tiny trumpets on my countertops and carpeting my floor in the area I put the stems into a vase.  Because, yes, despite the volume on the olfactory noise, these flowers have peaked, and every handling shakes loose some of the florets.  But they needed to be gathered.

You smash them, they last longer.

They disintegrate, but shall return.

They aren't delicate.  And they aren't dead.

You conveniently tend to forget how they are capable of choking you.

As it turns out, it may be that longer term relationships with them are best conducted via stand-ins.

So pretty, they are.


image of old-fashioned lilac, author's own
V.S. Naipaul's opinions, his own
Olivia Giacobetti's genius, her own

Indigenous Scents, or, Love the One You're With

Outside my bathroom window, pressing against the partially opened casement glass, generously wafting throughout that level of the house, is a Miss Kim lilac.  So full of blooms, and so distracting, when I try to come up with adjectives for how smothered and ponderous with panicles it is, my mind keeps on half-attending and only comes up with words like "abundant" and "smothered."  (As if "ponderous with panicles" isn't trite AND awkward.)  Yeah, sure it's got all the benefits of being nature's air freshener and all that.  But there is so much more...it could be any window...it is the idea of this, this *offering,* being made again this year as every year, that distracts me and fills my brain with thoughts of each of those little tiny flowerlets with their mole-nose like openings and walking the alleys to find overgrown shrub-trees hanging over fences so I could gather a few and looking for them while walking home from school as a kids and thinking about how those were grandparent flowers because they talked about smelling them when they were kids and imagining my great-grandparents burying their noses in lilacs in the Great Plains and the North Woods and the Ozarks and oh, it's heady but it won't last long.

So why don't I think of it as "serious" for perfume?

Here am I, cheering on any yard I see harboring an old-fashioned lilac.  Holding all sorts of powerful emotional memories tied to their presence and triggered by their smell.  But it took me three years to build the courage...and find the right space...for an old style (full height, loose looking most of the year) lilac.  Even with that, I picked one with white flowers.  I was, and am, grateful for the Miss Kim, which blooms later than the traditional lilacs, but which holds to a more modest height and looks more like a shrub than scrub the rest of the year.

It seems that I treat the stalwart old-fashioned like the stereotypical well-heeled person would a trusted member of the staff...appreciate it, will sing its praises in the right company, but want it to stay out of sight unless I need it.

Funny, when I see a bottle of perfume marked "lilac," my first reaction is to think of my Nana's scented talc, and move on.

When I see a listing for Patou "Vacances," I get all moony, and linger on the write-up for something I'll never have.

One way or the other, dismissed or beatified, lilac is...beyond reach.

Perhaps this is why one of the few lilac scents I love is En Passant?  It is both messed up lilac (I mean, seriously, do you rise your bread dough in your lilac bush?), and fleeting (so I can only "hold" it for a limited time).  Like the name says, it is an impression in passing.

But what of this other element that haunts me, this attribute of being..."common"?  Does this spell doom for garden flower scents?  That is, flowers from MY garden?  After all, jasmine and champaca might be outright weedy in other climates...like, say, orange blossom in Arizona or Southern California, or bougainvilla in San Francisco...

Uh-oh, I just complicated my train of thought.  Do we have tiers of privilege at work here?  Those tropical flowers are "special" (oooh, exotic...), the edgy climate ones "worthy," but the workhorses of the midwest?

Let us review.

Lilac.  Iris.  (Which is to say iris FLOWER, not root.)  Apple blossom.  Peony.  Lily of the valley.  Mock orange.  Tartarian honeysuckle.  

Rose could be tossed in there, but I think that's a side issue that deserves a discussion unto itself.

Iris, we toss outright.  Nobody has done that.  Why, I don't know.  I'm going to turn that into a separate discussion, too...is it just too darn hard?  Did nobody pay attention to the fact that the flowers smell so blasted good they are practically narcotic?  Is it because you can only smell them if you chance to catch their "throw" (and can identify what is the source), or if you stick your nose right inside the petals...and let's face it, that's kind of like sticking your schnozz into a Georgia O'Keefe painting?

And we know what *that* means.  (And sorry, skanky fans, but that is NOT what the inside of an iris smells like.)

But discussions of iris are moot, because there is no flower based perfume.  Harumph.  Of course, given the variations I smell in the irises I grow, you'd first have to pick a "baseline" iris.  (Just among the beardeds, there is what I would call "traditional" iris smell, a grapey smelling one, a clearly lemon smelling one, and a softened "lemon chiffon" smelling one.  Of those that smell.  That are bearded.)

Let's pick a trio.  Lilac, Apple Blossom, Honeysuckle.  What's your first thought?  Raise your hand if you thought "good perfume for a girl who wants perfume but is really too young to wear perfume."  Hands down.  Raise your hand if you thought "something my grandma would be comfortable wearing." Hands down.  (And take a moment to think about the conflicting ways grandma gets hit with "unh-uh" reaction when it comes to perfume...too aldehyde-y...too mossy...too garden flower-y...really??)  How about a show of hands for anybody who thinks "Avon"?  Okay, anybody not raise a hand yet?  Please take a moment to comment RIGHT NOW if your first thoughts for any one of those is "serious perfume."  Seriously.  And, to keep the game challenging, tell me what apple blossom or honeysuckle perfume you find "serious."  If you insist on lilac, go anywhere but Vacances or En Passant.  

Maybe I'm pursuing a dead end.  But seriously...doesn't something smack of privileging the exotic over the backyard here?  I don't mean to invoke evil Colonialism, either; I just mean...maybe...the grass is greener over the fence?  You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?  Something along those lines.

To be fair, there are some small perfumers who use their backyard.  Roxana Villa champions her local oaks in her politics, and features their essence in some of her perfumes, notably "Q." Liz Zorn has teased Facebook followers with images of mock orange blossoms she is currently putting through enfleurage, and will some day end up in one of her bottled creations.  

But what is on my mind, right now, is the idea that there's plenty to be found in the realm of tropical white flowers, or the root of a florentine iris.  (I'm going with the belief that "florentine" refers to Florence, Italy, not Florence, Alabama.  Orris root.  There is, incidentally, a Louisiana or swamp iris, but I haven't smelled that one.  I digress.)  Nothing of the iris I find inside the flowers in my garden.  Nothing of the apple tree I fell asleep under as a child.  Nothing from the flowers that not only smelled good as you rode past, but also tasted flowery sweet if you plucked them and sucked out their backsides.  

I'm going to go outside and find one of the spots where the irises are currently throwing their scent.  Happy invisible pockets that stop me in my tracks and make me remember that I am here, right now, this year, inside this moment, which is incredible.  

But will pass.

And, if fate allows, will come again.

A mole nose is shaped like a star.  Learned that a while back, thanks to some reading or other with the kids.  When they were short.  And would wander the garden with me, going on a "scent hunt."


ADDENDUM:  Sonofagun.  Zeitgeist.  I leave, go to check some of my favorite blogs...and it seems that granny in the guise of "old lady" was on Helg's mind today.  See her discussion of "Old Lady vs. Older Woman."

Ephemera

Nothing lasts forever.

Unusual are resurrections, real or illusory.

Nature provides us with a little bit of magic each spring.  Out of seemingly empty ground rises life.  Most of this life stays with us through the growing season.  Those that last the season and then return for another round are "perennial."  Those that pump up the volume, ever churning out the blooms for a constant production of seeds and propagation, but die at the end never to return, are "annual."

Then there are those that appear but briefly, disappearing back into the earth well before the growing season is over, nearly disappearing from our understanding of the very landscape they lie waiting beneath.

The most common of these is bulbs...the crocus, the tulips, the daffodils, the hyacinth, which come up, pump color into an otherwise still waking tableau, and then retreat as the others start to fully develop.  These bulbs are kind of showy, like the supporting actor in a show who chews up the scenery in the second act but has nothing to do for Acts Three through Five.

Less considered are the quiet, more fleeting ephemera.  The ones with gentler blooms, that lurk tucked in shady areas and under the emerging canopies of other plants.  Or which might pop up in plain sight, in an area that the rest of the year reads as "there's nothing there."

Just listening to some of their common names is fun: trout lily (aka dogtooth violet, lat. erythonium americanum)...skunk cabbage...bluebells...dutchmen's breeches...May apple...Jack-in-the-Pulpit...bleeding heart...coltsfoot...lady's slipper...wake robin.

From childhood on, a springtime activity in my life has been keeping an eye out for the ephemerals.  Some would appear in your yard; others required a walk in the woods.  You never knew just when they would appear.  You never could say precisely where they would appear.  Basically, you simply had to be aware and ready.

Looking for ephemerals carries an unfortunate similarity to snipe hunting for those who have never seen them before.  How can you know where to look?  Whether or not you've found what you are looking for?  You need a guide.  My favorite guides were not bound and in my pocket.  They were other humans, people I cared about very much, and who had this magic ability to find a sort of "abracadabra" in the humus.

Loving ephemerals requires both patience and a willing suspension of disbelief.  Patience, to ride the long interval between appearances.  Willing suspension of disbelief because, unlike those showy bulbs, ephemerals present no identifiable presence underground.  Ever.  So, if you miss them, you can't go digging for gold. They're just...roots.  Among other roots.

At the top of the post is a photograph of a patch in a shady part of my yard.  I went back there this weekend on a hunt.  I've been in this house but a few years, so I still find myself pleasantly surprised by the hosta and the bleeding heart that follow the daffodils, all of which are additions I made to a basically bare patch.  You can see they've come up again this year. You can also see a surprise that greeted me back there, a classic sign of the cycles of life, an empty bird's nest.  I look past the bird's nest, still searching.  I take note of something else.  You, of course, can't notice what I can't see, because it isn't there.  I, as you might have guessed, notice it because it isn't there. That something?  Trillium.

Somewhere beneath the dirt here, and in two other patches of "ideal conditions" of the patch of earth I tend to, are the defunct root systems of Trillium grandiflora.  Wake robin.  Ephemerals are tricky.  They tend to live where they choose, not so much where humans decide they should go.  Despite great care in site selection, the trillium I planted have not chosen to reappear.  What is not there is the substance of today's story.  What is not there...but might be.

Yes, my goal is to successfully bring into existence something which by definition will shortly leave.

I am not frustrated, though.  Fleeting beauty has a place in my life...as does accepting that you can't grasp all that you reach for.  I'll continue to cultivate, and wait.

Non-gardening ephemera I cherish:  A belly laugh from a friend.  The "A-ha!" look on a student's face.  Those moments when an ensemble of musicians totally connects with each other in a live performance.  Witnessing an aurora borealis.  Flow.  The smell of En Passant.

En Passant?  Oh, yes; the perfume part.

Perfume is by standard definition ephemeral when an application's duration is measured against the wearer's life span.  But it is not horticulturally ephemeral; it doesn't magically reappear once it has disappeared.

Unless...

Unless that perfume is En Passant.  Olivia Giacobetti's creation for Editions des Parfums Frederic Malle offers the kind of softspoken* scent that a woodland ephemeral could be proud of.  But it's the magic that En Passant pulls off on my skin...drawing me into the bread-y lilac dissipation through a cucumber-y rain with this haunting echo of the thing that connects Apres L'Ondee to L'Heure Bleu (what is that? heliotropin? it's that meringue marzipan desert thing)...making me love it...and then...disappearing.

And then...abracadabra...it's back.  Pulling a wonderful meta-trick; the perfume that is supposed to allow the ghost of Apres L'Ondee to haunt it now haunts you.  You need to be patient...you can't watch the clock...but if you are open to it...you'll find it.

Magic.  Real magic.  That creates the illusion of bottling the ephemeral.

Maybe by the time my bottle runs out, the trillium will come in.  

*please remember that softspoken does NOT equal "simple"

image credits:  Top image author's own.  B& W photograph of trillium undulatum from Chest of Books.  Third image of trillium grandiflorum appears on the Scottish Rock Gardening Club bulb log diary of 2006.

Today's post is included as part of a month long festival of flowers coordinated by artist/perfumer Roxana Villa.  Use the link on the upper left of this page to see Roxana's list of contributing writers and artists, or go to the opening page of Illuminated Journal here.

Spring on tap

Must have been magic.  Roxana contacts me last night to let me know Greenwitch is now available to sample.  I've been curious to try that since she first tempted us with a quick reference to it in the depth of winter (followed by a full post explaining her methodology).

Then I head out for a brief foray and hear the first birds of spring at night...

...and wake up this morning to knowing, just knowing...sure enough; the beds are ready.  I clear away leaves, cut down the perennials, and *as I am working* some daffodils poke up.  The soil is the right warm; it smells fantastic.

I spend the day working with decomposing material, clearing it away, saying a little thank you for how it protected the live things during this incredible winter.  I get a home project done.  I finally shower...thinking, of course, that a decision is coming up...

...have been egged on by perfume pals and weather to make the leap...

...thinking...thinking...

...and after mentioning doors #1 and #2, I pick door #3.

En Passant.

And it has been beautiful.  I remembered just how beautiful shortly after spritzing (it is a bit odd straight off).  And the best part has been how it has haunted me these 5-7 hours since...it famously leaves the wrist after a couple of hours...but it isn't really gone.  It apparates in the air just around you, time and again, for hours.  You can't put your nose to it...it's gone...but yet, it comes back to you.  Beckoning?  No, not quite.  Nearly embracing.  More like a little visit.  And gone again.  

Perfect.  Like glimpses of the spring to come.  (And, which will go again.)  A bit of a ronde, a dance mimicking the entry of the season.

Today's beautiful weather will not last.  But it will be back.  More and more so.  As such, a reverse of En Passant, which slowly comes back less and less.  

What a great cross-fade.

Event Scent vs. How I Want to Smell

I'm exploring the idea of categorizing perfumes in one of two columns:  In column A, Event Scent.  In Column B, Me Scent.

Event scents are the ones whose mere presence is an event.  They are performers.  They make you pay attention.  Not because they slap you across the face (or smother it...can you hear me, beautiful but room only for you Fracas?), but because either through their development, or the way they transport you through memory and time, you find yourself paying attention to them instead of your environment.

I mentioned SIP Black Rosette the other day as one of those perfumes.  That's one in the development category; you find yourself ignoring everything else so you can follow its development.  Then there's En Passant, on my wrist as I write, transporting me to beautiful spring, gone now, on a day when I know fall will soon be gone, too.  There's Arpege, which not only has a development event, it goads my musician self into seeing if I can identify intervals.  And there's any number of I Hate Perfume iterations, but I'll refer to Black March, because it gobsmacks me into the middle of one of my pots when I'm out with the terracota, dirt, and flats of plants on a spring day.  (I know other people get earth dirt, but I get potting soil, all the way.  Love it.)  

Opposite the Event Scent is how I want to smell.  Not simply an amplification of my own "au naturel," as it were, but a scent that extends me.  What was that line about "making me more than I am?"  There's Parfumerie Generale L'Ombre Fauve.  I could disappear into that one myself, a delicious creamy musk that is ever so slightly sweet on me.  Leather you lick.  Also from PG, Bois Blond.  That makes me feel like I'm wearing a little bit of my favorite patch of forest.  I know, not a direct association.  It's not a Christopher Brosius creepily on target re-creation.  It is an impression, and I like the way it smells, and the way it smells on me.  And then there's L'Artisan Fleur de Narcisse, which never lets you settle into thinking it's "pretty," but is a beautiful trip through a true narcissus, and hay, and what not.  Compositions, these are, in every sense of the word.

Unfortunately, this event scent/my smell duality leaves me with a few knots.  What, for example, to do with my Chanel loves?  Bois des Iles.  (Sighs.)  This is gorgeous, but I both get caught up in smelling it as wanting to smell of it.  Those aldehydes draw attention.  They're a bit showy.  They live on their own.  This means it is not a "what I want to smell like" perfume, but a "what I want you to smell on me" perfume.  There are others:  Bel Respiro.  Amarige.  (Actually, I think you could put white florals in general in this category, as far as I am concerned.)  And bridging the gap between:  Lancome Magie Noire.

Shalimar?  I love to smell it, and love to smell it on me, but I harbor no illusions that it is a part of me.  Event Scent.  Musc Samarkind?  Gently sweet, but a hint of animal that rides close to my skin and makes me double check every time I sniff.  Me Scent.  

Pondering....