
I’m writing and researching my new romance based around perfumes and perfumery. I’m discovering lots of information I was previously unaware of – like the processes for developing absolutes, concrete, enfleurage pomades and so on.
It is true that every profession controls access to the knowledge within it by applying its own language and attribution of specialised meanings to particular words (eg concrete). While I’m not seeking to invade the profession of the perfumer, I do want to know enough that my characters can navigate that domain without too much embarrassment.
So I search and I study and I find myself wandering off into unknown worlds, some of which can be confronting, but each provides an education of a sort.
This morning I went down a rabbit-hole exploring the plants that provide us with their very essence in order that we may wear it as perfume or diffuse it as fragrance or employ it medicinally or in some other fashion.
By whatever means, a click here a side-bar there, my internet perambulations brought me to a couple of sites discussing how plants communicate with each other, how they ‘learn’, and defences they might deploy for their own protection or for other plants around them.
Who’d have thought? Obviously, lots of scientists. Check out this National Geographic documentary.
An NPR article on “Are plants talking to each other?” and an Australian Geographic article, “Plants talk to each other” refer to collaborative experiments across the University of Western Australia, the University of Bristol and the University of Florence in which it was discovered that corn seedlings communicate with each other using clicking noises. Fascinating!
I can’t be sure yet how much, if any, of this information will find its way into my story. Let the characters decide.
The Beaulieu Birthright is the second story in my Priceless Heritage series.
The first book was “The Salignac Legacy” released by Champagne Book Group on November 16, 2020.
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