Finding the Essence of the Rose

Rose Story Farm became a science lab this past week as we worked with Michael from Scents of Knowing to turn our roses into unique and wonderful fragrances. Michael designs and builds his own apparatuses for the distillations, creating an entirely one-of-a-kind product.

As many of you familiar with Rose Story Farm know, fragrance is of primary importance to us, and we work to grow a diverse variety of roses with powerful scents. These scents and smells evoke wonderful memories of time with family and friends, but our cut roses don’t last in a vase forever. The ability to capture and preserve the essence of a rose in a fragrance through distillation was an opportunity we couldn’t pass up.

Michael has been to the farm before to make rose water, but we ramped up production and more than doubled the size of the project, which involved saturating the rose essence with pure frankincense oil from Oman. Rose and the warm, woodsy frankincense have a beautiful affinity for one another. This is a twist on an old, traditional style of distillation used for centuries in India that uses sandalwood essence as the medium.

There were six stills that were divided into two groups. The first set of stills each had a single variety of rose. Julia Child was set up in one, Gertrude Jekyll in the other, and Yves Piaget then in another. Stills 4, 5, and 6 each had a number of the most fragrant varieties we could find.

Three to five pounds of rose petals were immersed in water in the 50-liter flask for three hours where they first begin to release their energy and powerful essence. We then turned on the heat source and brought the water to a rolling boil and continuously added rose petals throughout the process. Typically, commercial distillation uses steam as the extracting method, but in our case, we are immersing the petals water, the most universal solvent on the planet, in a process called hydro-distillation.

The rose water vapor then rises up through the double-walled glass condenser where the condensation of rose water meets the frankincense oil and the two essences join in what Michael describes as a perfect marriage. The total distillation time is somewhere between six and nine hours. Twenty-five to forty pounds of petals were used in each still. That is more than 1,200 stems per flask!

Roses are one of the best flowers to use in the distillation process. Unlike a wood that would have to be soaked in water for days, roses easily give up their essence through their petals. It will take three to six months, however, before the fragrance will be fully formed.

We plan to have our first ever symposium at the farm in September with world-renowned experts in scent aromatherapy and the plant distillation process. Stay tuned for more information.

Thank you to Victoria Pearson and Scents of Knowing for the beautiful images.