Before Essential Oils:The Long History of Working With Plants

If you spend much time in the world of natural wellness, it can sometimes seem as though essential oils are the plants. Lavender means lavender essential oil. Peppermint means peppermint essential oil. Rosemary means rosemary essential oil. But essential oils are only one way of working with a plant.

Long before we had rows of little amber bottles, people were steeping plants in water, soaking them in oils, simmering roots and bark, adding herbs to baths, burning aromatic plants, cooking with them and finding countless other ways to bring plants into everyday life. And I think that is worth remembering.

The Plant Came First

Humans have had relationships with useful and aromatic plants since antiquity. Across cultures and generations, plants became food, drink, fragrance, body preparations and part of the everyday practices people used to care for themselves and one another.

Many of these methods are beautifully simple.

Pour hot water over a plant and you have an infusion.

Simmer tougher plant material in water and you have a decoction.

Allow herbs to spend time in oil, then strain them, and you’ve made an herbal infused oil.

Different cultures developed their own plants, methods and traditions, of course, but the larger idea is remarkably familiar: people learned that there were many ways to work with a plant.

Essential oils eventually became another one of them.

So When Did Essential Oils Come Along?

This is where the history gets interesting.

You’ll sometimes hear that essential oils themselves have been used for thousands of years. That’s a little too simple.

Ancient cultures certainly used aromatic plants, perfumes, resins, infused oils and fragrant preparations. Distillation technology also has a very long history and developed gradually rather than appearing at one particular moment.

Distillation became considerably more sophisticated during the medieval period, including important developments in the Islamic world. By the Middle Ages, techniques for distilling aromatic plants were becoming increasingly established. By 1500, Hieronymus Brunschwig published what is considered the first printed manual devoted to the distillation of medicinal waters.

So aromatic plants are ancient. Distillation is old.

But the familiar modern world of standardized, concentrated essential oils in little bottles, and the enormous aromatherapy industry surrounding them, is a much later chapter in our relationship with plants.

That distinction matters.

An Essential Oil Isn’t a Stronger Version of an Herb

This may be the misconception I encounter most often.

There can be a tendency to think that if lavender is lovely, lavender essential oil must simply be more lavender.

Chemically, that isn’t really what is happening.

When I put an aromatic plant into Ruby, my copper alembic still, steam moves through the plant material and carries volatile aromatic compounds with it. As that vapor cools and condenses, I collect the distillate and ultimately have two beautiful products: essential oil and hydrosol.

The essential oil is a highly concentrated mixture of volatile compounds from the plant.

But those volatile compounds are only part of what was present in the original plant.

The whole herb contains many constituents that don’t necessarily make the trip through the still.

In other words:

The essential oil isn’t the whole plant. It’s one beautiful part of it.

One Plant Can Become Many Different Preparations

This is one of my favorite things about herbalism.

Take a plant and change the way you prepare it, and you change what you draw from it.

Water is particularly good at extracting many water-soluble constituents. That’s part of what is happening when we make an herbal tea or infusion.

Oil-based preparations draw out oil-soluble components.

Alcohol and mixtures of alcohol and water can extract still another range of plant constituents.

Steam distillation specifically captures volatile aromatic compounds.

None of those preparations is automatically the “best” one. They’re different. And that is an important distinction when you’re working with plants.

Sometimes I want an essential oil.

Sometimes I want a hydrosol.

Sometimes I want an herb slowly infused into oil.

Sometimes I want the simplest preparation of all: a handful of herbs and a cup of hot water.

The preparation depends upon the plant, what I’m making and which aspects of that plant I want to work with.

Why I Still Love Essential Oils

None of this diminishes essential oils. Quite the opposite.

I am a clinical aromatherapist, and essential oils are an important part of what I do. I use them throughout so many of the things I create at twig leaf flower, and I love distilling the herbs I grow organically myself and watching that remarkable transformation happen in Ruby.

But my work with plants doesn’t begin or end with essential oils.

You’ll also find jars of herbs infusing into oils. Tins filled with loose-leaf tea. Hydrosols. Dried herbs. Salves. Botanical body preparations. And plenty of plants growing outside waiting for their turn to come into the apothecary.

Each preparation gives me a different way to work with the plant.

That is part of the art of formulating.

There Is Wisdom in the Whole Plant

Perhaps our little bottles have become so familiar that we’ve forgotten how extraordinary the plant was before anything was extracted from it.

An essential oil is concentrated and aromatic, which makes it exciting. You can open a tiny bottle and immediately experience something powerful and recognizable.

A jar of dried leaves may not seem quite as impressive. But generations of people knew what to do with those leaves.

They steeped them.

Simmered them.

Infused them.

Cooked with them.

Bathed with them.

Made oils and salves with them.

And passed what they learned along.

Modern knowledge gives us wonderful new ways to understand the chemistry of plants and use them thoughtfully. But it doesn’t have to replace those older, simpler ways of working with them.

There is room on the apothecary shelf for both.

Maybe that’s the part I love most.

Essential oils are remarkable.

But they were never the whole story.

The plant was here first.