A Peek At The Rose Harvest

Dear Tender Flower Friends, 

This is from the June newsletter, in which I try to give you a sense of May’s rose harvest. Growing the plants for Tender Flower from my bit of land is a real thing, not a pretense photo -op bid for authenticity. It’s a trend for some botanical and green businesses to pretend they farm, or live farming, when they don’t. I find this both dishonest, especially to the consumer, and disrespectful to all those who genuinely toil from the soil. More on this hot and hushed topic soon!

Fragrant, abundant perfumery roses are both the peak of the growing year, and the doorway to summer.

Roses are the plant foundation of the TF gardens, while the spiritual essence of rose is the foundation for all the gardens, even if no physical roses are present. It’s interesting that the wild ones try to get into each garden, though.

The potting shed (garden house), dubbed the Rose House, becomes a magical place in the midst of rose season. If you opened the door, the glorious scent and sight of roses would flood your senses with their beauty.

Anticipation intensifies as the first buds appear and swell steadily.. when will they open? Now begin the daily early morning checks, imagining the joy!, the fragrances!, the beauty!, but also, bracing for the pace, less sleep, the long hours at the still.

This year, with a mostly very cool…even downright chilly, Spring, the roses decided to open early anyways.

There is nothing to do but ride with it, which means rising at 4:00 a.m. for a sketchy breakfast, then out to the roses, often in my nightgown. Harvesting needs to be done carefully yet quickly, not to bruise the roses, also to make certain they are ready. It can be uncomfortable, for sometimes I get hungry, thirsty or need to pee, but all must be deferred until the filled baskets are safe indoors, ready for the still or drying table.

Distilling roses well involves being present to pluck at the right moment, just when they open up enough & begin outbreathing their scent. Wait too long, and the volatile perfumes will have floated away into the atmosphere. 

If it’s warm, which is usually the case, I’ll ask Mr. K. to help pick, as roses need nimble handling, including de-petaling, then quickly into the still. 

Chilly or mild, cloudy dawns presented a different scenario, though, with the roses opening in three or even four different flushes throughout the morning. 

Adding a little drama to the scenario, is that other farm chores need choring, all at the same time:  seedlings in trays need watering, the chamomile and other plants need picking, enfleurage trays and tinctures need recharging, after which roses from the 2nd and 3rd flushes also need to be harvested.

Knowing how to tesseract is helpful 😉, because there’s just one of me.

The very fragrant rugosa varieties on the farm have a couple weeks of exuberant bloom, then flower more sparsely, here and there until autumn. Damasks, gallicas, centifolias, and little wild roses (most time consuming to pick), however, only have one bloom period, lasting a week or two, then vanish completely until the following year. 

Every morning I wade through an ocean of roses, into the thicket for blooms, minding the prickles, moving between bees and ladybugs as the basket fills. Thankfully the brown thrasher waited until the roses came to a trickle (now) before building her nest in the 34’ long rose hedge.( *Turns out, now that it’s July and I was privileged to watch the entire egg to fledge process, it was cardinals . Their eggs are similar, and I had seen the thrasher in the hedges for a week..so.j

Following the rose flow this year translated into distilling a record nine days in a row (and then intermittently, following peak bloom). 

But the damasks, queens of their species, were scarcer, opening only a few at a time each day, compared to the normal basketful. This Spring was not their favorite, making possible only one very small batch of damask -rich hydrosol. The multifloras OTH, bloomed for over two weeks, and as they grow in different micro zones of the land, were the best harvest yet.

Distilling is attention intensive and also very physical. One constantly monitors condenser temperature, qualities of distillate fractions, and volume while  adjusting heat & condenser water.

A lot happens on the subtle level, too.  With each plant I distill, I become that plant for awhile. With the rose, feelings of immense love and expansiveness in the heart chakra arise.

As I write, for comparison, the elderflower harvest is underway, and when I distill these flowers, sleepiness and a dreaminess belonging to a part of the elemental world come over me. Of course, I don’t stay there, just as with rose an effort is required to breathe back into center. Resilience & joy grow stronger with each rose distillation. With elderflower, there are gifts of insight and canniness which linger.

Variables and nuances of plants’ features fascinate me, especially in the scent department. With one of the rugosa varieties, the backside of the sepals smell of pine resin on a warm morning. In chilly mornings, the multifloras exude a cut grass aroma; in bud their perfume is reminiscent of musk rose; fully open they’ve a nuance of Camay soap. Are you old enough to remember that? 

While distilling, it’s been my custom to sample the beginning or “head”, middle and tail end, both by smelling and tasting. It’s very informative. A first fraction experience this season was remarkable, revealing both the bitter, astringent aspects of rose, amplified as to be shocking, yet in perfect balance with the radiant rosey characteristics chemists would list as phenyl ethyl, geraniol and linalool, hexanal (that cut grass!) plus a green Moroccan pine resin note: so much n a few drops of hydrolat about the rose’s fragrance & medicine!

I think of it as Tender Flower “rose colostrum”.

Now here’s a peek at some of the 9 different types of rose extracts in process, not including the enfleurages. We have different mediums and methods of extraction here, plus different varieties of roses. Some will steep for 3-5 months, others even longer. 

I hope you enjoyed reading and imagining and viewing the photos.

It appears the next update will happen in July, more on that in the next newsletter. Some of you may be eagerly awaiting the return Rosalia Serum & Complex Mist, and the beautiful rose hydrosols, and have gotten a bit more of an idea of the work that goes into these products.

With love, 

Donna