Lily of the Valley

A demure and quietly beautiful little flower that grows in the shade of bowers, the Lily of the Valley hails spring as surely as the Robin’s song.   From creeping rhizomes they emerge from the litter-strewn ground under a giant spruce tree or on the forest floor in the ash grove, in middle May.   The verdant green shoots unfurl into oblong-elliptic pointed basil leaves which have a silvery cast in the morning dew.  The little bell shaped flowers arrayed along a central stock like pearls were sometimes called fairy bells or lily bells.   Purest white in colour, they almost glow in the dim twilight. There is a luminous quality about them.

Their fragrance is revitalizing to the winter weary.  It has the signature of youth.  Honey bees, recently awakened, find the resinous sap, as opposed to nectar, most appealing.

 In the last century, Springtime in Paris boasted promenade vendors selling Muguet des Bois (Lily of the Valley) on every corner.

To bring bouquets of the fairy flowers indoors, permitting their fragrance to waft throughout the house is tonic.   Their fragrance is truly a breath of spring.

Robert Louis Stevenson who was ill for much of his life speaks of Lily of the Valley as a medicinal tonic in one of his novels.  Reference reading suggests that components of the flower’s essence act similarly to digitalis (also derived from a flower—foxglove).

 I remember well, a dark green glass vase with a delicately fluted edge which seemed always reserved for Lily of the Valley in my childhood home.  Their fragrance is etched in my memory as though it was only yesterday when they were gathered by my dear mother.

My mother wore the fragrance Muguet des Bois by Coty.  Formulated in 1936, the Nose (perfumery terminology for the designer of fragrances) must have known secrets of alchemy to have transformed the delicate flower scent into cologne that was remarkably true to the actual fragrance as it is found in Nature.  Some refer to it as an amazing “green note”.

Today, when so many of us have become sensitive to the synthetic natures of many perfumes, the herbal simple, does not affront our olfactory senses.

I hope there will be a return to old fashioned methods of creating fragrances as they are found in Nature.  As a master gardener once told me with conviction, “Nature does it best” and Lily of the Valley, Muguet des Bois, surely cannot be improved upon.   Its green note is perfection.