Jenjin

Black Rose, Nutmeg, and Smoked Amber

Black Pine, Frankincense, and Leather

Odilon Redon

Long shadows of raw myrrh, pine pitch, and incense smoke streaked against dry amber, yellow frankincense, and vanilla balsam.

Saturnino Herrán

Marigold petals, oakmoss, and copal resin.

Ferdinando Noulian

Lustrous white eyes hovering like lanternlight: silvered musk, iris absolute, Indian sandalwood, black tea, bergamot, snowdrop, and dried fig.

Hans Printz

Blackened lilac, lavender incense tar, bone sandalwood, labdanum, hemlock accord, and frankincense tears.

Marie Bracquemond

Sugar-dusted iris petals.

Angelo Jank

Snow-thick sandalwood, eucalyptus leaf, and a scattering of dead leaves clinging to skeletal branches.

Valentine Cameron Prinsep

Summer’s last blooms encased in frost: chilled dahlias, marigolds, wild roses and ranunculus strewn across icy grasses.

Everton Sainsbury

Dusty leather, a hand-worn blackthorn staff, frankincense resin, tolu balsam, wild grasses, and medicinal roots.

Caspar David Friedrich

Oak boughs, olive blossoms, tendrils of thick, overgrown ivy, fossilized amber, and crumbling stone.

Mary Hiester Reid

A riot of late-summer color: hollyhocks, anemone, rose mallow, dahlias, toad lilies, agapanthus,
cock’s comb, and helenium in a rolling bed of sweet grasses and hearty mosses.

The Lantern Bearers, Maxfield Parrish

Radiant orbs of luminous lemon amber illuminating a backdrop of black orchid and ivy-twined, plum-touched cerulean musk.

Holiday goals. Mushrooms and clover splashed with champagne and green musk.

Here’s to a kinder, gentler year: lavender and mallow with orris root, angelica, frosted vanilla bean, and osmanthus.

To Gossip, Slang and “Cuss-Words”

I’ll bid a last “Adieu”

And place a bridle on my tongue

And thoughtless actions, too!
 

A sugared cherry chypre with red labdanum, moss, and roasted chestnut.

Good  Luck! Good Luck! I say

Be yours this

NEW YEAR’S DAY

May 2024 bring us all good fortune, prosperity, good health, safety, peace, and mercy.

Wet slaps of cloudberry-clotted multekrem, fattigman crumbs, and rivulets of nisse musk.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Let’s all turn over a new leaf –

and be good

Well, it’s worth a shot at least. Rose petals, gargantuan green leaves, and a splashy, fresh chypre. 

A Halloween lure: the feral musk of cryptids lurking in an old growth forest peeping expectantly
at a bowl of sticky-sweet caramels, toffees, chocolate bonbons, and butterscotch candies.

A scarecrow’s cologne, crunchy with hay and spattered with foamy, sweet soil:
a cornmeal fougere with patchouli root, clove bud, honey stout, roasted oats, fermented apple pulp, and bourbon cream.

Oak bark, tree sap, wild acorns, and a touch of honey.

The century oak, rugged and gaunt,
Holds high to-day, as he was wont
A hundred years ago, his head,
Hoary with snows that have vanished,
Defiant and grim to the wind’s wild taunt.

The hooting owl finds here a haunt,

And feathered choristers now chaunt

As when the century’s dawn made red

The century oak.

No season’s coil his heart can daunt;

Processive years their changes vaunt,

But, constant till the line have fled

And mouldered in oblivion’s bed,

He holds his own, rugged and gaunt, –

The century oak.

– Harvey Carson Grumbine

Beeving it up this year with matcha tea cheesecake.

London Smoke. The foggy grey of Victorian London

 A black tea fougere with tabac flower and grey amber.

Got the Morbs (Soc.,1880). Temporary Melancholia. Abstract noun coined from adjective morbid.

Definition via the 1909 book "Passing English of the Victorian Era"

The very morbiest: ink-black musk, opium tar accord, clove bud, and myrrh.

There was a pumpkin floating in the swamp. Every day it would bob and drift, floating around with the alligators and the gar. 

 Amber-touched pumpkin rind and murky oud plunked into a boggy melange of mosses.