Grower News

“Banana! Today, it’s banana,” Carole Biancalana declares, pressing a star-shaped bloom to her nose. A basket swings from her freckled forearm. Her hair is the colour of a wheat field. From July to October, the flower grower’s land is speckled white with jasmine — these précieuses étoiles (precious stars) as she calls them. They appear every morning, as though fallen from the night sky. Thousands of flowers to collect — quickly, before the noon rays burn their fragrant wax. Sometimes, they smell sweet and sticky like apricot jam. Other times, after balmy summer nights, they give off indole; a sensual, almost animalistic compound. Today, it’s banana. The harvest is then carried to the factory, where the notes of the day are captured in an absolute. It takes about 2,000 baskets-full of jasmine — more than 1,500 pounds — to produce a single litre. Biancalana does this every day, just like her parents did when she was little, and her grandparents before that and her great-grandparents before them. Everything is done by hand. There is no machinery, no chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Nothing that could compromise the purest expression of the flowers. She grew up with these flowers on the Domaine de Manon — though it wasn’t called that then — in Grasse. The verdant corridor, wedged between the Pre-Alp mountains and the Mediterranean, seemed destined to become the cradle of perfumery. Written in the stars, you might say — those in the sky and in the fields. But it actually happened out of necessity, as a way to mask the unpleasant smell of leather tanneries in the area in the 17th century. Eventually, the tanneries closed down and the flowers proliferated. As a young girl, Biancalana learned the secrets of the most famous of these flowers: Grasse’s Rosa centifolia , a rose as bright as bubble gum. Her grandfather taught her to graft it onto wild rose bushes to make it more resistant and to bundle up its stems before the cold came. It was a quiet, tender childhood, but Biancalana had her sights set on the city. In […]

Source: www.thestar.com