Archivi categoria: In English

Essays in English, written from scent as a way of thinking – sensoriality, geography, memory, transitions and a deeper understanding of the Earth.

Aromatherapy, Emotional Aromatherapy, In English

Scent, Taste, and What the Mind Cannot Say

There is a language older than words, and it lives in the nose and on the tongue. Scent and flavour travel a direct route to feeling, arriving at the body before thought has time to build its usual story around them.

A note of bergamot, benzoin, a trace of vanilla in the air: these reach us the way a memory does, whole and immediate, long before we have named what we are sensing. Taste works the same way — one bite carries us somewhere specific, a kitchen, a season, a person, faster than language ever could. Both senses seem to answer directly to emotion, bypassing the analytical mind and speaking straight to something older and more embodied.

This is, perhaps, the deepest gift of working with raw aromatic materials: they offer a form of knowing that sits outside explanation. A material can hold real, verifiable qualities and, at the very same time, carry an emotional charge that no amount of description quite exhausts. Both are true together — the precise and the poetic, standing side by side rather than competing for the same ground.

Practising emotional aromatherapy means trusting this dual nature of scent: factual and felt, concrete and resonant, all at once. It offers the body a direct route to emotion, one that asks for nothing more than a single breath.

English aromatic landscapes, In English, Materia Viva in English

The Wandle river – Materia Viva n.9

Each issue of Materia Viva begins with an aromatic material and follows it as one might follow a trail: not only its scent, but the landscape, history, gestures, images and words that the material carries with it.

river wandle mitcham UK

This time, the thread leads to a river: the Wandle, nine miles of water flowing from the hills south of London to the Thames. It rises from chalk, and that explains much of what follows: rain filters for months through the porous rock before re-emerging as spring water, cold and clear in every season.

An entire district of trades grew up around that water. The damp meadows along the river supported mint and chamomile, while lavender grew further away where the soil became more gravelly, and the same stills were used to distil them. Further downstream, mills ground tobacco for snuff. At Merton Abbey, William Morris moved his entire production in 1881, after having the river water analysed to make sure it was suitable for printing with vegetable dyes.

It is a story of water and hands. Of a single current that, over nine miles, allowed very different trades to exist — growers, distillers, dyers — all sustained by the same natural resource: crystal-clear water.

A recent special edition of the e-zine was also devoted to Mitcham peppermint, tracing the history of this aromatic plant through the landscape, people and industrial heritage of south London.

You can receive a free PDF copy, and for further details about the project and how to support it, contact us via the WhatsApp button on the website or by email at professionefelice@gmail.com. You may also discover the next issue of the ezine, about the Ramy, a resin from Madagascar.