Lavender

These days, a stroll through the lavender fields of Brihuega coincided with reading Federico Kukso’s book, “Odorama: A Cultural History of Smell.” There are things that stink and are exquisite, like cheeses and perfumes with refined scents that, however, if we drink them, are disgusting. There are also days when humanity stinks as a whole and nights when a single body of that humanity smells and tastes like candy.

The smell, the good smell, has always mattered to us. But the civilized world never smelled good until personal hygiene and sewerage became widespread well into the 20th century, so perfumes have been a good way to cover up bad body odors for centuries. Acadian terracotta from 1200 BC refers to distillation practices for perfumery. The Romans perfumed their bath water with dried lavender flowers, hence the plant’s name. The Arab sage Abū Yūsuf al-Kindī, in the 9th century, explains in his texts how to distill alcohol and lavender plants. According to al-Kindī, lavender essence was valuable as a relaxant and calming agent, helped summon sleep, and was also good for healing wounds, burns, insect bites, removing warts, acne, or throat infections.

We really like its smell, as well as its color and the resistance of these plants to the heat and cold of the Alcarria region. The Lavandula genus consists of 39 wild species. Lavandula intermedia, a hybrid of lavender (Lavandula angustifolia) and spike lavender (Lavandula latifolia), is mainly grown in Guadalajara. However, our favorite is the spring and wild Lavandula stoechas, which is the scientific name for Spanish lavender. It has become fashionable to stroll through these cultivation fields whose chromatic beauty is no greater than that of a poppy field among the cereal or sunflowers with still fresh flowers, but it is difficult not to be seduced by their “perfume” because they do smell like perfume. In our 21st century, there are hundreds of commercial colognes that include lavender essence in their composition, but smelling lavender naturally is very different; there is something subtle that a purchased essence cannot capture. Perhaps it’s the breeze today, the mix of its unmistakable aroma with the smell of dry earth or other plants from nearby hills, or this intense color, between blue and purple, that provokes a strange relaxation, but also euphoria. Carl Jung said that purple was the most harmonious mixture of red and blue, that that color was “between the human and the divine, and was the union of the two natures.” We do not get caught up in greater analysis, values, or symbols, but La Alcarria remains one of our favorite outdoor places. Not far from these fields, we also discovered new plantations of oak trees mycorrhized with Tuber melanosporum, black truffles, a fungus that is also pure edible perfume. But we’ll leave this inquiry for another day.

Ramón J. Soria Breña