The Essence of a Cedar Tree

Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs;”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Only a few weeks ago did I realize that essential oils are not essential in the colloquial sense of the word. That it’s not like “Pack the essentials” or “essential amino acids”. Rather, essential oils are “essential” in that they capture the essence of a plant.

Last winter, we distilled the essence of sugar maples in the Green Mountains of Vermont. This summer, we hopped, skipped, and stumbled our way to the Salish Sea off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. On Whidbey Island, we distilled the essence of cedars and lavender.

It is trite, to say the least, to mention that the climate in the Northwest differs from the climate in the Northeast. We all know that. When I think of New York, I think of hot, humid summers and frigid, blustery winters. When I think of Seattle, I think of cool, misty fog and rain. Lots and lots of rain. 

My impressions come from decades of small talk and from brief interludes in their urban canyons, walking from one climate-controlled building to another, my mind shuffling through lunch options, my eyes on my phone, checking how much time until my next meeting.

But to live on a farm, to live outside, is to touch the climate. Where air conditioning means the salty breeze and shelter means the big cedar tree you duck under when a raincloud rolls in. It’s like the difference between a soccer video game and digging your cleats into the grass chasing after a ball. Did you know that rainy Seattle gets 20% less annual rainfall than New York City? And that Whidbey Island gets less than half that of New York? Only 8 inches more than desert-like Los Angeles? Nearly none of that rain on Whidbey touches down in the summer months, and so the non-irrigated fields are as brown as the California hills of my childhood.

Growing vegetables in Virginia and growing vegetables out West — it becomes obvious why California, Arizona, Oregon, and Washington produce almost all of the U.S.’s organic produce. The East is green in the summer. The West is brown. The East is alive. The West is largely dormant or dead. Humans are only one of many species that likes eating fruits and vegetables. Farmers use non-organic methods to combat aggressive pests (i.e. pesticides) and aggressive weeds (i.e. herbicides). The climate in the West just doesn’t harbor the same mess of herbivores, diseases, and weeds. Grow vegetables out West and as long as you have an irrigation source, you can drip irrigate the roots of your crops while competition desiccates 2 feet away, an utter lack of moisture as effective as any herbicide.

Once I step beyond the uniformly manicured cities, I notice how foreign one landscape is from the other — the East being known for its deciduous forests and the West dominated by its coniferous forests. Everything struggles during the West’s dry summers, but the waxy conifer needles are good at conserving water. And because conifers hold onto their needles, they can better take advantage of the mild, wet winters.

And so, in the Pacific Northwest, we craned our necks toward the canopy of Douglas Firs and Sitka Spruces and Western Hemlocks and Western Red Cedars, we picked our way through brambles of blackberries and huckleberries and blueberries and salmonberries, and we brushed against stinging nettles and thistles on our way to Seafolk Farm.

There, we joined another young family. They’ve carved out a few acres worth of rows of lavender, rosemary, and thyme; lemon balm, chamomile, and yarrow; all which are thriving in that cool, dry-summer climate. Firs and cedars and hemlocks encircle their land and cover much of the island. All these yield essential oils for the farm to package and sell individually or as a part of other value-added products. Some days, I hacked at the branches of a fallen cedar tree deep in the forest. But most days, we cut lavender and distilled her oil.

With the lavender in full bloom, we’d take handheld sickles to a row, cutting a handful of stems with each pull of the sickle. We’d gather the flowers and stems, careful not to upset the swarms of bees in the flowers, and drop them into a 55-gallon drum. Juneberry would join in on the fun, crawling all over the tarp-covered raised beds and harvesting in her own way. We could stuff 50 or so full-grown plants’ worth of flowers into the drum. From there, we’d hoist the drum — and by we, I mean a tractor — into a larger holding drum and fasten the two together with a drum ring.

The distillation runs for about 12 hours. A boiler pumps steam into the bottom of this apparatus. The steam churns through the lavender. At the drum’s top, the rising, lavender-laden steam is funneled through a narrow opening into a condenser — a hollow metal coil enclosed in a stainless steel tube. Cool water from a nearby large tub of water is pumped continuously through the metal coil. When the steam hits the coil, it cools and condenses back into liquid, dripping into a copper tube that drains into an essencier.

An essencier is a bit like a miniature version of the evaporator pans we used to make maple syrup. Condensed lavender steam, like maple sap, continuously dribbles in and then slowly meanders through a series of chambers. The serpentine evaporator gives the maple sap time to boil off excess water and concentrate the sugars. The serpentine essencier gives the hydrophobic, less dense essential oil time to separate and float above the water. Eventually, at the end of the maze, you have your product. The sap becomes syrup. And the condensed steam becomes essential oil. The excess water drips out an outlet in the floor of the essencier as more condensed steam drips in.

About 40 pounds of maple sap will make one pound of maple syrup. For essential oils, the ratio is much more extreme. Running steam through a 55-gallon drum packed tight with lavender flowers and stems — a row of lavender more than half the length of a football field — yielded about two cups of essential oil. And lavender is one of the heaviest oil producers. 150 pounds of lavender flowers can give one pound of oil. It takes 4,000 pounds of rose petals — can you imagine? — to get one pound of rose essential oil.

The scarcity is reflected in its value. A cup of that maple syrup sells for $10. A cup of lavender essential oil sells, cumulatively, for $700, in tiny 5 mL vials. The three precious gifts offered by the Magi to baby Jesus were gold and essential oils. Frankincense is derived from Boswellia trees and myrrh from Commiphora trees. Today, some essential oils are literally worth more than their weight in gold.

Chemically, the oils are complex. Lavender oil contains hundreds of distinct compounds. What the oil is useful for depends on who you ask. A holistic doctor may prescribe lavender oil as a treatment for anxiety or insomnia. An angsty teen may drop some oil onto a swinging car pendant. A soccer mom may add some to her diffuser. A bartender may add a drop or two to simple syrup for a fragrant cocktail. In the Middle Ages, you may have come across a Catholic bishop using lavender to ward off evil spirits and nobility using lavender to ward off body odor. 

For the lavender herself, her oil likely attracts pollinators and makes her unpalatable to animals and insects. The oils are volatile organic compounds, meaning they are easily aerosolized, floating on air as an advertisement to pollinators or overpowering the palates of would-be herbivores.

And so it goes for every plant species. Plants can’t run from predators like rabbits. So they turn to chemical warfare to survive. And they can’t run to each other to procreate, like rabbits. So they brew love potions to attract pollinators. Depending on the intended function, plants produce these volatile organic compounds, i.e. oils, in their roots, their bark, their leaves, and their flowers.

A windstorm knocked down a western red cedar tree in our backyard and a neighbor cut down another threatening their house. From those two trees, we collected enough small branches and feathery leaves to fill the 55-gallon drum twice, producing a few cups of cedar essential oil. A tree distilled into a few small vials of oil. The essence of western red cedar.

We saw cedars on the Olympic Peninsula that were a thousand years old, over 100 feet tall, with giant roots embedded in the soil.

At first, holding that 5 mL vial of cedar essential oil felt powerful. Like I had captured the larger-than-life tree into something manageable, something I could grasp. A genie in a bottle, almost. 

But then, seeing the huge cedar tree I had spent the last week camping under, his lower branches way heavier than me, each of his million scaly leaves as intricate as a human face, it felt like… something had been lost. We would cringe if someone pointed to some kid’s 5×7 school photo and said “this is the essence of human.”

I’ve talked about “lavender oil” but that consolidation obscures the bounty of varieties. Seafolk Farm alone grows at least eight varieties. English, French, Spanish; angustifolia, intermedia; Hidcote, Grosso; white lavender, purple lavender, yellow lavender. Some are cultivars within the same species. Some are different species altogether. Each with their own branching habits, their surprisingly varied flower shapes and colors, their subtle differences in smell. Some leave my hands black and sticky after an hour of cutting. Others are more gentle. The bees seem to prefer some over others — maybe those plants concoct more attractive oils.

As I watch their distilled essence drip from the condenser into the essencier, I don’t feel the same excited anticipation that I did when watching the water boil off maple sap. For one thing, boiling steam through 55 gallons of plant material for 12 hours gives off a too-strong almost-sickly smell. Nothing like the cozy maply air of the sugar shack.

There’s something else, too. Something about the proximity of the industrial to the natural. Every industrial process begins with the exploitation of a natural process. It’s just that most industrial processes today are so far removed from their natural origins, that we rarely think about or acknowledge the connection.

I wade through clouds of nectar-hungry bees to chop down lavender flowers to concentrate her chemicals into a small enough volume to bottle up and package and ship. I commoditize an entire genus of living beings — Lavandula — under the label of “lavender essential oil.” 

What value have I added? The lavender performed the alchemy of air, water, and sunlight into hundreds of volatile organic compounds. Those compounds can be inhaled without distillation. My value is industrial value. We distill the lavender so that her compounds can be inhaled on an industrial scale.

C’est la vie, perhaps, but what attracts me to living a more agrarian life is rediscovering my relationships with the more-than-human world and encouraging others to rediscover their relationships, too. Purchasing an essential oil in downtown San Francisco — that is no relationship, no more than our relationship with the bodies and personalities we fetishize on Netflix. Distilling essential oils fits well into the modern pattern of exporting more-than-human life to mechanical urban centers in stylish packaging, sold as the essence of a relationship while being little more than a simulacrum of the Real Thing.

On the surface, maple syrup production seems similar. And it can be. Industrial-scale maple syrup production exists. But the difference, for me, is that the heart of maple syrup production is still stubbornly accomplished on a community scale. You’re just as likely to see a few buckets hanging in a front yard as you are to see tubes snaking through miles of forest. The maple syrup we made was bought by folks who came to the woods to buy it. Late winter in Vermont is a time for warming up in a sugar shack with friends and family; for appreciating the giant maples that are so easy to ignore when unadorned with leaves; for marveling at the life awakening in the quiet trunk. Maple syrup has forever provided crucial calories for people at a time of year when calories are hard to come by and the maple tree is an indispensable part of that culture.

Conversely, the herbs, the trees, the living beings, those seem more forgettable when buying a vial of essential oil off a shelf. Few bother to distill essential oil for personal and community consumption. It would be far easier to snag some cedar leaves or pick some lavender flowers and rub them between your fingers. And it’s more meaningful, I’d like to think.

Or perhaps my reaction simply stems from the difference between my participation in the two processes. In the sugar shack, I tended to the fire for hours. I’d continually check the sap levels in the pans; not too low, not too high, how’s the viscosity looking, how much left in the sap reserves? I’d step outside into the freezing night to split more wood to shovel into the furnace. Distilling oils was closer to the “set it and forget it” side of the spectrum. Boiling down maple sap was certainly more tedious, more inconvenient, but if those were our sole measures for whether or not something were worth doing, we’d never have kids.

Or maybe what got to me was the contrast between the beginning and end of each harvest. Maple syrup, you start by tramping through wet snow to drill a hole in a dormant tree. You end in spring, maple syrup on your pancakes, and that tree budding out fresh new growth. Essential oils, you start with a beautiful, densely purple field alive with the hum of insects. You end with a cup of oil and, well, when the distillation process is over, the tractor hoists the drum out and dumps the spent flowers into a pile out back. The row of lavender has been compressed into a column of dead sticks. It is compost, to be cycled back into life, but the contrast of the lively flower to the lifeless oil and lifeless stick makes me wonder how much value I was really adding.

To reduce a plant into an object to be marketed and sold is to completely divorce her from her essence as a living being in relationship with the other beings of her community. You can experience the scent of lavender oil from anywhere in the world. You can only be in one place when running your hands over the tops of lavender in a field on Whidbey Island.

There’s another side to the story, of course. A hint of sweetness under the bitter smell. The family at Seafolk Farm has accomplished what few others we’ve stayed with have. Through their essential oil distillation, they’ve figured out how to be financially sustainable without relying on an outside income, no small feat for a young family on a small farm. Their operation is intimate, thoughtful, and beautiful. Solar power runs their boiler and they only harvest from fallen branches and trees for their tree oils. In an industry where the reality is almost always nothing like the green fields and smiling chickens depicted on packaging, Seafolk’s operation is that rare exception that is maybe even more idyllic than a customer’s imagination. I mean, they literally walked along a beach with their kid at sunset to collect seaweed as one of the ingredients for a room spray product.

The idea of condensing an ecosystem into a 5 mL bottle for retail out of some hipster shop may be unsettling. But the reality is that the sales of that hipster shop support a family living in touch with the land. That is something to be applauded, and maybe even something to aspire to.

When we left the Pacific Northwest, we carried some oils with us. When I open the little vial and smell the western red cedar oil, my memory is overcome with visions of leaving my tent, bending under low branches in the morning fog, watching Juneberry pull cedar leaves off a branch, crushing the leaves and holding them to our noses to inhale that musky coniferous scent together. The vial may not hold the true essence of the cedar, but I’d like to think that my memory retains an essence of our relationship with the cedars on Whidbey Island.