Alchemy distills Lavender hydrosol from local organic gardens

What excites me most about just about everything “plant” is the SMELL. The fact that they are also medicine is a bonus.

As an esthetician, I create plant-based holistic skincare using the rawest ingredients possible. Most of the time, I rely on others to harvest the on a large scale, but I have always wanted to try my hand at hydrosol or essential oil extraction.

Doing this distillation from plants harvested from my yard and the yards of friends was exciting. And expanded my reverence for the process and the plants.

I have a much better understanding of just how much plant material it takes for the harvesting of essential oils. In the pounds of raw lavender there wasn’t enough essential oil to skim off the final hydrosol (and so I just left it in there).

Someday I want to wild-harvest and distill from nature IN nature. Imagine harvesting a sense of space and place via the local flora and creating fragrant potions to uncork at a later date as a form of time travel or teleport. For inspiration, check out JUNIPER RIDGE

What is a hydrosol?

Sometimes called “floral waters”* they are the water soluble plant medicine and can be harvested as a by product of the steam distillation of essential oils OR distilled for the purpose of extracting the potent medicinal and aromatic plant essence.

Hydrosols are a very pure form of aromatherapy because they medicinal qualities are dissolved by water and it’s easy for our bodies to absorb.

There is evidence of distillation from ancient times, but the term ‘hydrosol’ was coined by Jeanne Rose in the mid-1980s.

It’s all chemicals… and hydro refers to the water, and ‘sol’ to the chemistry term for solids suspended in a liquid.

It’s worth noting that there is a historical connection with floral waters and early medicinal practices. One of the oldest continuous distillers of floral waters in Europe is Santa Maria Novella in Florence (Firenze). They began making preparations to treat a plague era in the 1300s. It didn’t really work, but the stillroom must have smelled amazing.

I’m more of a “yardener” than a gardener, and have been adding culinary herbs, and distillable plants for a few years. The artemisia, yarrow and geranium aren't plentiful enough, yet. But the lavender is thriving. Because I’m interested in the fragrant essence and not the purest medicinal distillation, I harvested the late season growth of lavender.

At this point I’m slightly annoyed with myself. It took me three years to work up the nerve to set up my still. And I denied myself this sensory treat.

Seriously. What was I so worried about? I think I let all the steps intimidate me, and I had visions of pressure cookers exploding. After weeks of taking notes in the margins of my books and watching videos, I finally did it.

It was a sensory treat!

The process is actually pretty beautiful. You use all of your senses when running the still.

The nose is the most obvious. You pet the still, touch the water in the condenser, as you monitor the alembic. You listen to the kettle burble, even sing a little which helps to track how steady the boil is and you’re visually tracking the rate of flow through the condenser watching the drip of the hydrosol. And finally taste. throughout the session, I taste test to make sure plant material and not just water was being produced.

Distilling hydrosol and distilling for extracting essential oils is a similar processes but with different the heat/speed requirements. I hope to learn more about collecting the fragrance in the form of essential oils as I practice with the still.

These precious bits of distillate will find their way to the treatment room preparing potions for skincare.

*Floral Waters sometimes refer to distilled water with fragrance added.