Thursday, April 12, 2012

Early Bird Sale! Sun Goddess Serum

Sun Goddess Serum

With the heavenly smells of Chinese Jasmine filling the herb room, I've been picking the tiny, star-shaped blossoms as they open, and gently stirring them into native, organic meadowfoam seed oil.

Meadowfoam is a fantastic plant from the Pacific Northwest. Its seeds (nutlets) are filled with wonderful oils made almost entirely of long-chain fatty acids, including three kinds that were previously unknown. Moisturizing, nourishing and wrinkle-reducing, meadowfoam seed oil is also a natural form of UV-protection, which makes it perfect for a summer facial serum. Smoothing and healing, it also works miracles on dry and damaged hair.

Once the delicate jasmine flowers have released all of their fragrant and beneficial essential oils into the silky meadowfoam seed base, I'll strain them out and compost them. The remaining scented oil, with its incredible skin-care properties, will become a luxurious base for a limited-edition Jasmine and Frankincense Sun Goddess Serum.

Early-Bird Sale!

The first of my Summer 2012 small-batch formulas, Sun Goddess Serum will be available on a first-come, first-serve basis, with 20% off for pre-orders. To reserve yours, you can call me or send an email with PRE-ORDER in the subject line. Regularly $40.00 for 30 mL. plus S&H, they come in a small pouch with their own dropper, and a hand-signed label.

Unlike large companies, I blend everything by hand and in small batches, adding blessings and care to each bottle. When I come up with a new recipe, I test it on myself, friends, family, and finally my lucky clients, adding a drop of this or a mL of that to make sure it's as fresh and useful as possible. And I take pride in the fact that no two batches will ever be exactly the same!

Forty Blooms of Jasmine...

So after three weeks of anxious waiting and watering, I am thrilled to announce that my Chinese Jasmine is blooming! The smell is intoxicating, and when you enter the herb room at night, it fills the air next to the windows with the most exquisite perfume, heady and delicate all at once.

Jasminum polyanthum is apparently such a good climber (mine has tendrils that are well over three feet) that it's become invasive in places like Australia, where it acts as a smothering ground cover. And in warmer climates like Florida, it's considered an awesome way to cover up yukky-looking fences and walls. As a cultivated botanical, it prefers to be potbound (finally - my kind of plant!), and can usually recover from (ahem) mistreatment or neglect, aka that time last summer when I left it outside and forgot to water it on a super hot day week and all the leaves fell off.

Despite all this, here in New Hampshire it is decidedly not a year-round outdoor plant, and it takes some fairly specific growing instructions to keep it happy:

Fertilize except right after flowering. Keep it dryish in winter and moist the rest of the year. Give it lots of sun and warm weather except in Autumn, when it needs at least six weeks of cold temperatures to "set" the buds. In Winter it wants lots of light and cool temperatures, at which point the buds will start to form. Prune it like crazy after it blossoms, and propagate the 4" cuttings in moist soil. Finally, give it something to climb on.

All of this was a bit confusing to me, because I didn't really notice anything happening in Fall, followed by a sudden growth of tendrils a few months ago. I actually cut it back pretty significantly in January (totally wrong season, oops!) where it still hadn't recovered from sun exposure, and much to my surprise, it started sending out tendrils. And leaves! And then -  buds! And then.... 

...we still had buds. And a week later... we still had buds. Every day I'd check them each time I'd go in or out of the house, and every time I'd think "Soon. Any day now..."

This went on for a month. I was beginning to think I'd really screwed things up and maybe they just weren't going to open, when last week - one did. It smelled like heaven. I was so happy I almost cried. (It's the little things, you know)?

I carefully picked it and placed it on a wooden tray to dry, and I must have gone over and sniffed it about thirty times that day. One tiny little star-shaped blossom, with a yellow center peeking through its translucent stem, and the most magnificently exotic floral fragrance. And it was there, in part, because of me. Even though I'd let it dry out and I'd pruned it in the wrong season, it had bloomed; a fragrant acknowledgment that sometimes doing your imperfect best is plenty good enough. And I had - I'd been there to water it and move it inside and outside and make sure it had enough light and nice things to grow on and its runners were cut when they needed it, and I'd talked to it and trained it carefully to grow where it had room to stretch, and in myriad small ways, that flower's existence was linked with mine, for good.

Anyway, by the next morning there were two more open blossoms. That night, there were three. Then five.

After that, it was like popcorn.

I've stopped counting, but every day I pick more and put them carefully in a jar of meadowfoam seed oil. I've seen pictures of tropical places where they cover entire walls and doorways with tens of thousands of flowers. I'll be lucky to get forty. But oh, those forty fragrant blooms, each one a gift...

Blessings,
Blackbird's Daughter

Monday, April 2, 2012

Spring 2012

Rye Beach, New Hampshire after sunset.

Welcome to Blackbird's Daughter, and happy spring!

My name is Jessica Bellantone, and I'm an intuitive healer and educator. My current specialty is spiritual aromatherapy, so I spend lots of time immersed in my ever-expanding collection of organic essential oils, mixing intricate perfumes and on-the-spot blends to enrich the lives of those around me.

For those of you new to the Blackbird's Daughter blog, this is the place where I chronicle and reflect on many of my inspirations, ideas, and adventures. I've played with Blackbird's Daughter in a variety of formats over the past three years, using it a a template and tool to develop my skills as a healer and explore my path's myriad directions. Part dream, part business, and part fairy-tale, it's been a fairly rolicking, frequently haphazard journey, filled with the kinds of glorious encounters and hilariously rueful life-lessons that seem worth sharing, nestled between pages of all-natural products and workshops. Updates come sporadically, at best, when I tear myself away from my many projects and passions long enough to write about them!

The past few seasons have been busy ones, filled with lots of changes and new ideas germinating and starting to sprout. As always, my biggest focus, both personally and professionally, is following my life's path wherever it leads, despite - and because of - it's twists and turns. The scenery is nothing if not fantastic!

I'm so glad you've come to visit! Look around, have fun, and stay in touch. I look forward to working with you soon. Thank you for exploring with me, and many blessings,
   Blackbird's Daughter

photos by Scott P Yates Photography

Copyright (c) 2009-2014 Jessica Bellantone. Please email me when reproducing content. Thank you!

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