AFRICAN ORCHID

A couple of days ago I wrote about reformulating Little Stars, but as I’ve been working on it, it’s quickly morphed into a different genus of white-flowered, night-fragrant orchid, an angraecoid of some sort. Angraecoid orchids are native to East Africa and Madagascar, where they grow in dry forest areas, but smell strangely similar to the South American Brassavola species after which Little Stars was named. I think I'll call the new formula African Orchid - dibs on the name, people! You saw it here first. 

Little Stars has its fans, so I decided not to pull it entirely, just supplement it with a new white night-fragrant orchid scent. Angraecum orchids have a fragrance reminiscent of jasmine, ylang-ylang, carnation, and sometimes root beer. Those main heart notes are combined with my special orchid 17 accord, which gives it a moist, soft, dark, brooding touch, along with a base of high-end musks and light vanilla. 

I’ve tried several iterations of the first mod and am liking it quite a bit. It takes a while for the materials to blend, so there’s a waiting period to see exactly how it will turn out, then more waiting periods as it goes through the initial series of tweaks to get the proportions of everything right and add whatever modifying notes it needs. I already like it better than the original Little Stars, though. It’s lighter and more juicy, less in-your-face woody, less heavy on the ylang-ylang, which can be overpowering, and smoother, with a tiny bit of a fruity accent. It’s actually more like a real, natural orchid fragrance.

I’m going to work on African Orchid over the holidays, as well as a few other new formulas. Testers should finally be getting a package of things to smell in January! With luck, I'll be able to launch it at the San Francisco Fragrance Salon in March. 

[Angraecum sesquipedale photo is mine; East African baobab tree photo adapted from Wikimedia]

THE BIG WHITE TROPICAL: AERANGIS DISTINCTA

It’s still cold outside, but the plants and the birds don’t seem to notice. This is the season when my orchids go full steam ahead into growth and spring blooming. One that’s blooming right now is Aerangis distincta, a Central African species. The plant itself is fairly small, and was happily growing in my greenhouse until someone (a walk-in customer, I think) bumped against it and knocked off most of its flower spike. Just one bud was left, but it’s blooming now, wafting out its fragrance as soon as it gets dark.

The flower is creamy-white tinged with orange. I think it must have gone all-out to make up for its missing companions, because it’s huge. The nectar spur is over 8 inches long! Seen in profile, the flower has sort of a streamlined, almost art-deco shape reminiscent of an airplane propeller, or a rocket nose-cone with the nectar spur shooting out after it in a perfect arc. The fragrance is the quintessential tropical white flower scent, like a mix of indolic jasmine, gardenia, ylang-ylang, orange blossom, and tuberose, with mega-sillage. It’s gorgeous. It reminds me of the tropical perfume that I’ve been working on. Over the weeks that the flower blooms, the fragrance changes a little, going from all-out indolic white tropical flowers to white flowers accompanied by lots of spice and aromatic woody notes. I’m always struck by the basic similarity of all night-fragrant white flowers, whether orchids or very different types. 

Another plant that’s blooming right now, in addition to the usual cattleyas and big blue vandas, is Maxillaria juergensii. It’s a tiny orchid species with spiky leaves that produces huge flowers for the size of the plant. The flowers are dark red, with a super-shiny, wet-looking lip. They smell like dead meat. You win some, you lose some. I’m sure the flies like the fragrance, but I don’t think it’s going to end up as a perfume. 

NIGHT-FRAGRANT ORCHID: ANGRAECUM DIDIERI

It's time for another botanical post. For some reason a lot of my orchids have been blooming this June. One surprise was the huge white flower that appeared one day a couple of weeks ago on my Angraecum didieri plant. The flower is almost as big as the plant itself, and is pure white with a long nectar spur and a broad bowl-shaped lip. In the photo you can see the nectar spur off to the right, behind the flower. Best of all, this orchid is powerfully fragrant at night. The scent is like strong ylang-ylang combined with smoky clove, and is almost identical to the scent of Brassavola species like nodosa and cordata, and hybrids like Brassavola Little Stars.

Angraecum is an African genus of orchids, mostly native to Madagascar. Brassavola orchids are native to Mexico and Central America. The two groups are not related, so it amazes me that they have evolved virtually the same fragrance. Both groups release their fragrance at night, both are white, and both are pollinated by moths. Ylang-ylang is light yellow in color and pollinated by moths, so there is obviously something about light colors and that type of spicy-floral scent that attracts moths no matter which hemisphere they live in.

A large relative of my blooming orchid, Angraecum sesquipedale, has an 18-inch (45 cm) nectar spur, with just a few drops of sweet stuff at the very bottom. When Charles Darwin first saw this species growing in Madagascar, he hypothesized that in order for it to be pollinated, there must be a moth with a tongue long enough to reach all the way to the bottom of the nectar spur. In fact, some years after Darwin’s death, the pollinator was discovered, with a tongue just the right length. Presumably there's a smaller moth with a tongue the right length for Angraecum didieri, too.

BRASSAVOLA ORCHIDS AND LITTLE STARS

It seems like time to write about another one of my creations, so what better place to begin than with the orchid that started it all, Brassavola Little Stars? Brassavola orchids are native to Central and South America, where they grow as epiphytes on tree trunks and branches. They have cylindrical, spiky leaves and masses of thick, exposed roots that most people would consider ugly, but when they bloom, what a show! Little Stars is a hybrid between two different species, B nodosa and B cordata, and it was the first Brassavola that I grew, back before I knew much about orchid growing. The first time it ever flowered, I walked into the house one night and smelled the most amazing and unexpected fragrance, something like ylang-ylang spiced with cloves. I had no idea what it was or where it was coming from, but it didn’t take long to trace it to my blooming orchid plant with its sprays of green and white flowers.

To make a long story short, the plant bloomed repeatedly over the years, each time producing the same exquisite fragrance, but only at night. Since then I’ve grown other white, night-fragrant orchids, native to both the Old World and New World, and found that most of them have a similar fragrance, a stunning example of parallel evolution.

Every time I smelled my night-fragrant orchids I thought how wonderful it would be to create a perfume that was like their scent. Eventually I had to try, starting with the ylang-ylang and cloves that seemed to be the basis of the Little Stars fragrance. It was then that I quickly discovered the principle of top notes! Both ylang-ylang and clove are fairly short-lived fragrances, so the mix would be gone within an hour. I then had to experiment with base notes, trying to come up with something that would hold the scent on the skin for a reasonable amount of time. I won’t bore you, dear reader, with all of my trials and errors up and down the learning curve, but in the end I settled upon a base that contained several different resins, spikenard, cedarwood, and a little synthetic agarwood (oud). The rest of the mix includes some citrus, green tea, and a few other floral notes. I would say that in the end, the blend is about 80% natural and 20% synthetic.

In the end, because of the constraints of perfumery, the fragrance isn’t exactly Brassavola Little Stars, but rather its dark and brooding cousin. It has the delicate, sweet and spicy top notes of my Little Stars’ flowers, but they’re riding on the strong shoulders of a woody, earthy base. Several people who have tried it describe it as a “goth” fragrance. Maybe that’s fitting for a flower that only comes out at night.