There are about 6 dozen plus essential oils that are well-known and available in commerce. Some are more difficult to find than others. For anyone who works with scent — myself included — this number is large, but not overwhelming. I’d say that because of the variety of oils, I rarely run out of ideas for scent blends or therapeutics!
And yet, problems abound. Many of the well-known oils are commodified in the marketplace, or have been placed on an endangered list, or are prohibitively expensive to purchase. Thus, I have to confess that the mention of a new or exotic essential oil is a great temptation, luring me to a new adventure with scent, especially if the oil doesn’t come with those drawbacks I mentioned.
As well, I’m convinced that the priceless connection to scent and essential oils can be found somewhere! But who, or what is a trusted source of info about the as yet new aromatic plants and their essential oils?
Choosing the Scent of Unusual Oils
The sources of information that I rely on when choosing the scent of unusual oils, indeed for any connection to the aromatic plants, are these: the short biographical sketches of the plants and their oils that are called monographs. As such, the plant bios often appear in books on herbalism, sometimes called materia medica. Each monograph contains specific pieces of information:
1. the common and botanical names
2. a description of the plant when it’s mature, especially its leaf and flower shapes, colors
3. its native geographic region(s), customary uses or history of use by a particular culture
4. the part of the plant that has substances humans want as medicine — its roots, wood, resin, flowers, leaves, fruit, or seeds
5. any distinguishing aspects, such as chemical attributes, safety considerations, and sustainability
Once a plant is identified by name and place of origin, how it is used, its chemistry, whether it is poisonous and the likelihood of its going extinct (or not), then the author can modify the plant’s bio or monograph with personal narrative. With many essential oils, the author’s experience serves to give an oil personality, illuminating the “unconscious” part, the feeling part, of an oil’s identity.
Plant profiles or monographs are written by practitioners who are what I would call masters of research. And some, more adventurous with self-expression, offer more than fact-related research. Helen Nagle-Smith’s collection of unusual oils features the connections to scent that I crave. This connection comes from both research and the “unconscious” experiences she describes.
Scent-Consciousness
Our scent-consciousness is partly “unconscious”, the feelings and impressions from our experiences that are registered in our minds. It’s automatic.
Aromatherapist and author Helen Nagle-Smith shares her scent-conscious experiences with the reader. In a personable way, she relates what it was like selecting the oils because of an intimate relationship to them. She says that often it was not just her thoughts, but that she’d received a message from them that “they wanted to be included”!
Contents of the Book
38 essential oils are reviewed in Working with Unusual Essential Oils by Helen Nagle-Smith. These include newly discovered oils or those that are traditional in some cultures, native to Asia, Europe, Australia, South Africa, and North and South America. See title and publisher, below.
The plants are described in terms of background, chemistry, safety, sustainability, and type. These are the major parts of the profile, while additional sections expand on scent personality.
Attributing scent or “personality” as an entry in the profile, Helen identifies things that resonated with her, the images, colors, and more that were communicated to her during experiences with the oil. (See note on synesthesia, below.)
Two more sections cover therapeutic properties of the oils that address physical and emotional issues and a third addresses why the oil has relevance “in our times” today.
Finally, the author places the oils in the context of known or popular essential oils, reviewing their application to pain, insomnia, trauma, the respiratory system, etc. And provides recipes for each oil. This could be a huge advantage when making the wrong decision would result in weak therapeutics, or miss the mark entirely!
Our Connection to Smell
In her collection of 38 unusual oils, Helen includes a wide variety of essential oils.
As a reader, I was encouraged to see the broad selection, but felt curious about the choice of oils, and why a few did not seem that unusual. You see, I’d picked up the book hoping to find a few floral oils described there, ones I am curious about using. Not finding many flowers, but reading on, I looked for something I think is special: it’s the connections to scent, from any part of a plant, that I crave to know more about.
Among the collection of unusual oils is an absolute for Violet Leaf, and several trademarked oils, Fragonia, Pineapple Myrtle, and Mango Myrtle.
Additionally, she presents Copal and Copaiba, two plants native to South America with connections to the rituals and spiritual values of local cultures. For Copaiba (Copaiba officinalis), there are a dizzying number (close to 50!) of common names, although this is not surprising due to its range. Specifics concerning the products of the tree are presented.
It’s helpful to have an open mind about a scent that’s new. For example, Curry Leaf (Murraya koenigii) is an essential oil I hadn’t, and likely would not have, imagined as an essential oil. But after reading Helen’s book, I now know the aroma of the plant’s oils derives basically from monoterpenes, meaning it’s a mild essential oil. Also its therapeutics are strongly posed to help digestive issues. Helen’s blended it with Juniper and Grapefruit. Or Clary Sage and Fennel. Having cooked with Curry Leaf many times, my blending senses are intrigued with these possibilities. Let’s see how I react in real-time and note what personality consciousness I can sense in the essential oil!
Conclusions
With essential oils, an overwhelming reason to choose them above other kinds of therapeutic substances is their significance to memory. The ways human beings have worshipped and adored aromatic plants for eons is today seen as a personal relationship, an influence on our smell sense, which doesn’t require thought or mental activity to work properly.
Those things being said, I ask, “what kind of information about these unusual essential oils is available?” I think that Working with Unusual Essential Oils meets the challenge of describing oils we’d otherwise not know about in concert with ones that we are already familiar with. Couple that advantage with the author’s belief that time spent with an oil that helps increase our record of reactions to smells. And allows our personal smell vocabulary to bloom.
“As you smell the essential oil, it keeps changing … Palo Santo has numerous layers … it’s deeply relaxing to work with …”
— Chapter on Palo Santo (Bursera graveolens)
Helen describes the sensation of smell as the sights, sounds and memories that reveal the personality of an oil. This ability is known as “synesthesia”, or cross-linking the senses. With exotics like Mango Myrtle, or any oil with a much plainer, less fanciful name, her way of receiving the gift, or knowledge of an aroma is truly unique.
Reading Working with Unusual Essential Oils gave me new perspectives in getting to know aromatic plants. I came to feel that as a reader, I’ll recognize a similar cadence in my experience, however distant, unfamiliar and faint it might seem at first. Accepting this idea, our responses take root in our memory. And may be understood better when I allow them space to express themselves!
It’s a human-plant, or plant-human, thing.
“Synaesthesia is the cross-modal assocation with colors, shapes, tones … and sometimes images and visions .”
— Forward by Jennifer Peace Rhind
NOTES:
Correspondences: known in esoteric herbalism as connections between one living being and another, regardless of outward appearances.
Synesthesia (American English spelling): a subjective sensation or image of a sense, rather than the one being stimulated. (Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary)
Title of the Book Reviewed Above:
Working with Unusual Essential Oils by Helen Nagle-Smith, 2024. Published by Singing Dragon, Philadelphia, London. 271 p. Useful Resources, Bibliography
Further Notes about the Book Reviewed Above:
Aromatherapy as practiced today is a recent phenomenon beginning in the early decades of the 20th century. In the Foreword to this book, find Jennifer Peace Rhind’s description of aromatherapists’ contributions to the trade for a concise history of how aromatherapists think about smell and aromatic plants.
Copyright, 2025 LotusLadyAromatica