Wild Card Distillation: California Pink Lotus
How To Harvest And Distill Pink Lotus Flowers.
Nelumbo nucifera
🌸⚗️ I stalked a local pink lotus pond for three years, plotting and planning to distill these big, fragrant flowers. I didn’t know what might be the outcome but I knew when the time was right, I would be packing my still for this adventure. They are most potent in the early morning so last Sunday at 5 am, I was at the pond with my extended arm berry picker ready to take on these big flowers. The Pink Lotus flowers distilled beautifully and there was no mistaking the powdery nucifera scent in the hydrosol. It took a little over three hours to end with 1000 ml of fragrant hydrosol. I loved it so much that I again sacraficed this last Sunday and returned to the pond at 5 am, picking lotus flowers as the sun rose. It was a spiritual moment to be sure. With the second distillation, I took the time to cut the petals into pink confetti like ribbons and packed both columns of the still with more material that the first time. This second ditillation was even more exquisite! I’m completely in love what is possibly the first Pink Lotus hydrosol in North America. What a wild ride this distillation was.
Thank you for watching weekly distillations of my wild foraging in Northern California plus some off the grid distillations of aromatics in my apothecary.
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