The first time I ran my copper still, the scent of rose filled the room so suddenly that I laughed. Watching the hydrosol thread its way into glass — light bound into water — felt less like experiment than revelation. Friends who smelled those first distillations still mention them, memories of those seasons still alive in our minds.
That was 2021. What began as curiosity soon became practice. I would cut roses at dawn, while the air was still damp and the blossoms had just opened. With clippers in hand, I moved carefully, taking only enough to balance my need with the plant’s own labor. As the sun rose, fragrance grew heavier; hundreds of blossoms warming in unison changed the air in ways that cannot be written down. The garden now holds more than 170 bushes, each with a temperament of its own — often referred to by their nicknames: Frederick, Queenie, Madame, Edith. Some are delicate, some strong-willed, one faintly anise-like, another cloying in the way of old French roses trained along the walls of a château. Their varied characters are central to their allure.
The hydrosols taught me patience. Roses give themselves for scarcely three weeks in June; what you gather in that time is fixed, a season held in water. I do not sell them now, for the work has turned toward the Society Botanica line. Yet I keep the bottles close. They remind me of the shared labor between plant and human, and of how that partnership can yield something remarkable.
Around this time, I began formal training in cosmetic science — chemistry, production, safety, the whole breadth of it. Outsourcing would have been easier, but easier flattens innovation. A formula is not a recipe; it is a system. It breathes, resists, and demands monumental patience — not to mention copious amounts of tea and good friends to keep one from collapsing in despair. The Silken Body Lotion took more than 140 attempts. Not failures, but studies — each one teaching something about balance, stability, texture.
Perfumery followed as if it had been waiting. Another garden, invisible but no less alive. The practice is steep: chemistry, instinct, persistence, and the slow building of olfactory memory that can only be done with practice and time in endless repetition. Some materials challenged me early on. Indole, for example, with its dense animalic weight, was difficult to imagine in the floral compositions it was known for. Yet without it, jasmine reconstructions are lacking in realism, feeling hollow. Over time, I came to see perfumery less as an arrangement of notes than as a means of building atmosphere — entire worlds that live on the skin and in the air.
Looking back, these years have been the crucible of Society Botanica: the still, the roses, the endless trials, the obsessive notes and databases. None of it was rushed, none of it dictated by market plans. It grew the way a garden does — season by season, detail by detail — until one day you look up and realize you are standing inside something alive.
Society Botanica is less a brand I constructed than a world that revealed itself — through rigor and laughter, through roses gathered on cool June mornings, through the understanding that the right combination of materials, fragrance, and design can open a door you didn’t know was there, until you’ve already stepped inside.
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