The cape
waterlily blooms at the height of summer, when it is jolly hot and one
does not mind getting
wet wading out into the dams to pick the blooms.
Rural
waterways come to life with the elegant blue blooms which emit a sublime
aquatic floral essence
- only discernible before the heat of the day vapor
rises it.
This highly
elusive fragrance can only be captured through the ancient perfumery technique
of
enfleurage - a labour of love.
Fresh blooms
need to be harvested daily ( yes every day ) ...and placed upside down into a
fatty
medium. This is then covered and sealed to create a kind of a womb
- like environment in which
all the perfume vapors are captured and
trapped in the fat.
Animal fat
was used in ancient French perfumery ... but I prefer to use vegetable butter.
The blooms
are then left for twenty four hours in the butter at room temperature , after
which
they are discarded and a fresh round of blooms placed into the same
butter.
Yes - that
means going back into the dam and fetching more blooms - every day !
After roughly
twenty repetitions of this process , the butter is then sufficiently
impregnated with
floral essence to enable the blending of a perfume .
The butter is
then washed in alcohol to transpose the floral essence into the solvent - from
whence
a perfume is born.
The laborious
process of daily harvesting and infusing , seemed somehow symbolic of the
pregnancy
process - a journey of time and energy to create and birth a fragrance
