Thursday, June 28, 2007

Follow my nose

Yesterday me, my husband and a friend of us, went to an orchid farm. It's an orchid farm but also a tropical garden that you can visit it has waterfalls, little houses, bridges etc, and of course lots of orchids. I was curious to find fragrant orchids. So the first thing I did when we came into the tropical garden, was sticking my nose into an orchid. A bit of a disappointment because I couldn't smell a thing. I wanted to smell all the flowers, so I followed my nose. I saw people looking in a funny way at me, but they started all to smell the flowers as well. The first orchid I found that had a scent had a faint odor. A bit sweet, soft not real spectacular. The photo I made of this orchid failed. It had a lot of real tiny yellow/orange flowers on the same branch, hanging down from a tree.

But the most fragrant I could find was an orchid that had the appearance of a big violet, and that was the common name of it as well, it's called 'Violet orchid'. The official name is Miltonia named after Lord Milton. I smelled the white version of this orchid first, because they were the first I found. The smell was fresh floral a bit lemony and a bit spicy, not at all like the smell of violet. When we walked a bit further I found more Miltonia's the white version but also Miltonia's in other colors. This time the white version didn't smell so strong as the flowers that I found before. I think it depends on where they stand.

Next to these white flowers there were also Miltonia's with a deep dark purple color, these had a faint scent like chocolate. Maybe if they were standing in another spot or when I smelled them at another time of the day they would smell stronger, I don't know. I know that many orchids are fragrant in the night. It was great to see and smell so many different orchids, there are so many of them, also many hybrids. When you like to see how a 'new born' orchid would look like if two different species would 'mate' click here

7 comments:

chayaruchama said...

Lieve Jenny-
What a great post !
You may protest about the photos, but I love them.
What evasive creatures they are !

Anonymous said...

oh... what a great orchid garden! I have an orchid that smells at home , too. It produces very little flowers but the scent is choco-vanilla-warm amber like. I have other supposedly smelling orchids, but especially one that I despearately want to smell has not flowered, yet. Well, I bought it as baby and maybe it will be her time this year....
Greetings to you!

Jenny said...

Lieve Chaya,
The photo camera I have is not a real good one. But I wanted to show the photos anyway to share it with the readers of the blog. Orchids are beautiful, you have them in real different shapes. I find that the white Milton orchids looks funny, it's like three men with sun glasses on, singing a duet.

Jenny said...

Dear Andy,

What kind of fragrant orchids do you have? Did you ever tried to create an orchid perfume?

Bea said...

Hello Jenny how are you?
I am so please with your idea. I want to start my own perfume line but I been using allot of different products. I've use from 7 to 15 different products. How many do you think I can use. I was reading somthing online and it said use a many as you want until you get the scent you want. What do you think of this process?
Please get back to me

Bea

Jenny said...

Dear Bea,

I think when you speak about products you mean fragrance materials, right? A perfume can contain a lot of materials, most perfumes contain something like 30 to 50 materials but there are perfumes that contain much more. Like I explained in my last post, you can overdo it when you use too many materials at the same amount, some of them are used as the 'skeleton' of the perfume and some are used to decorate it or to give style, modification etc, all in much smaller amounts.

Hope this helps.

Good luck with your creations

Anonymous said...

Hi jenny

This is Syed say lots of interesting articles of yours - really promising ones!!, can you help me with the best match to dilute oudh and blending best quality of mukhallath please