One of the things that we get asked most about at the Perfumery is the our still. What is it? How does it work? Whenever we're working on it, we always attract little clusters of people, even though there's really not a lot to see. Anyway, it's time to answer those curious souls.

In the Still Room (one of our work areas, not a meditation centre, despite the name) is a big stainless steel contraption with a conical top and various tubes and jars connected to it. This is our still. Not a poteen still; a plant still.

This is the device that we use to distill plant material in order to extract their oils for use in perfumes, soaps, creams and floral waters. Distilling oil from a plant or flower starts with gathering the plant material you need. It takes a *lot* of plant material to yield a little oil. The yield varies according to what you are distilling, that is, how much oil the plant species in question contains. It also depends on where the plant has been growing, how sunny and hot it has been, when it was harvested and so on.

This is Fionn and Sadie harvesting meadowsweet in fields near the Perfumery. Meadowsweet grows profusely in the Burren, especially on unimproved, marshy ground. It flowers in latter part of Jully or early August depending on where it is growing.

The trick with meadowsweet (as with harvesting any other flower or plant) is to get it at the right stage; in the case of meadowsweet full flowered but before it starts to go to seed. This can mean a bit of scouting around to find a field where most of the blooms are at the right point.

After that, you round up every pair of hands you can talk, cajole or coerce into helping and set to with scissors and baskets. Our still can hold approximately 1700 litres of plant material. That's a *lot* of flower heads. Especially when one is picking only a few heads from each plant in order to preserve enough flowers for re-seeding.

Back at home we lift the top off the still using a chain hoist, then we lift out the inner stainless steel basket. This is lined with clean muslin or cotton and then filled with plant material. When in place inside the still the basket sits on a ledge about 20cm above the bottom of the still. The space below the basket is filled beforehand with water.

The basket is winched up and lowered into the still. Then we attach the hoist to the top of the still and lift that up and into place. This is sealed into place with small clamps. Once everything is in place we light two big gas burners that are underneath and wait for the water to boil. It's a big surface and a large amount of water so this can take a while. When the steam starts to rise the whole Perfumery smells of meadowsweet.

As the water boils the steam passes through the plant material releasing the volatile oils. The oil laden steam then gathers in the cone of the still and fills the stainless steel tubing that extends out and down from the top. Inside the last section of tubing there is a water jacket, a spiral of fine metal tubing with a hose attached to each end. Cold water is fed through this jacket, cooling the steam and condensing out the water and oil.

The liquid is gathered in a large clean glass vessel that has special tapping points. As the liquid collects the essential oil pools on the surface. Distillation can take many hours, depending on the amount of material used and the expected yield of the plant.When we judge that the distillation is complete the essential oil is tapped off into a container.

Then we take everything apart, compost the exhausted organic material and carefully wash everything down so that is ready for the next batch. The slow and gentle art of steam distillation.