from The Chemistry of Essential Oils Made Simple by David Stewart
"Essential oils serve the needs of plants before they serve us. What they do for us they have already practiced on plants. Thus, essential oils come to us as experienced helpers and healers. Therefore, it is appropriate to learn a little about how oils function in plants to better understand how they function in us.
1. Essential oils are essential to the vital processes of living plants, which is why they are called “essential.”
2. Oils perform many of the same functions in plants as they do for us. Thus, they come to us as experienced and trained agents for health and healing.
3. Homeostasis is a state of wellness, balance, and proper function within an organism. Essential oils always work toward balance or homeostasis, first in the plants that created them, then in the humans who apply them.
4. When plants are injured, essential oils from within the plant flow to the wound, protecting it from infection like an antiseptic and initiating the healing process. They do the same for people when applied to human wounds.
“Essential oils play very important and diverse roles in plant metabolism. They serve to attract beneficial insects and defend against harmful microorganisms. Moreover, essential oils allow plants to send and receive signals and to communicate with one another.
Each plant has a particular organ for producing or storing an oil, for example, the glandular hairs in the outer cell layer (epidermis) of the labriate varieties such as thyme, marjoram,.. These oil (or hair) cells are living cells filled with essential oils or resin… Essential oils, resins, or balsams can be found in the oil and hair canals, and cavities of plant tissue.” Kurt Schnaubelt, PH.D.
Metabolism and Nourishment
"the life blood of a plant." They circulate through plant tissues and pass through cell walls, carrying nutrition into cells and carrying waste products out.
In people: cleanse our cellular receptor sites of pharmaceutical drugs, petrochemicals, and other disruptors of intercellular communication; chelate heavy metals and other toxins, helping to remove and flush them through the liver, colon, sweat, lungs, and kidneys.
Regulators of Plant Functions
plant hormones, regulating plant functions and orchestrating the production of vitamins and enzymes.
possess homeostatic intelligence.
To say that an essential oil works toward balance, and homeostasis means that the same oil can work in different directions depending on the needs of the plant or person. Oregano oil will kill hostile microbes while nurturing those that are friendly. Myrtle oil is an adaptigen that can stimulate an increase or a decrease in thyroid activity depending on a person's condition. (unlike drugs!)
Protection - kill viruses, bacteria, parasites, and fungi
Oils are Smarted than Antibiotics - have intelligence to distinguish good bacteria from bad and attack only the bad while nourishing the good.
Shields from Sunlight and Heat
The larger terpene molecules (especially the tetraterpenes or carotenoids which give colors and pigments to plants) actually lower the frequencies of visible sunlight down to infrared levels and re-emit the energy as heat.
Protect from dehydration. For example, in the Great Smoky (from essential oils!) Mountains, the trees emit a cloud of essential oil molecules to blanket the forest and reduce evaporation to preserve moisture.
Solar Amplifiers- to accelerate the ripening of the fruit and maximize its sugar content (rind). When the fruit is fully ripe, the furano-compounds disappear.
Therefore, do not apply citrus oils to your skin before going in the sun (for 12 hours?)
Healing and Repair
When plants are bruised, cut, or damaged, resin flows out of the wound (just like our blood).
For people - they offer additional protection from infection and accelerate the healing process. (unlike medical antiseptics)
Reproduction
Communication between plants and animals is by two means: by sight and by smell.
The flower has crafted structures that refract or reflect certain colors from the spectrum of sunlight so that what we see is actually an illusion of light. In some cases, these devices of the flowers can actually absorb invisible ultraviolet light from the sun and then re-emit it at a lower visible frequency making the flower appear iridescent, or brighter than the visible sunlight falling upon it.
One of he most interesting ways that plants communicate with animals is how they communicate with us, human animals. By their appealing fragrances and alluring shapes and colors, flowers entice humans to grow them, water them, feed them, and nurture them - thus assuring their survival. How can this be that a passive, immobile plant that produces no consumable fruit can do this - to motivate intelligent human beings to do so much for them? One wonders who is the more intelligent of the two.
Pheromones - message carrying molecules (usually ketones, aldehydes or esters) that convey meaning to specific animals or insects. (simple example is a lactone pheromone released by the female cat when she is in heat.)
Some biologists say that every animal species has pheromones, including humans. For example, a male cat picks up a lactone pheromone released by the female when she is in heat. This is the same compound (nepetalactone) found in the catnip plant (Nepeta catario) and catnip oil, that cats love so much.
Scent as an Expression of Individuality
People pick perfumes that suit their personalities. We express our personalities through our choices of the scents we choose to wear. Flowers do the same. From an individual rose’s point of view, it wants to be a rose that stands out, one that is different from the rest of the bushes and even from every other rose on the same bush.
Roses (and many other flowers as well) change their perfumes with the time of a day. Jasmine, for example, attracts certain night flying insects. Adjusting scents throughout the day actually attracts different insects at different times.
Flower fragrances also change with the aging of the bloom. Scents are normally not strong in the bud because at that time, the petals are not open and ready for guests and visitors as potential pollinators. It is when they are newly and fully opened that their perfume is the strongest. When a flower ages and its pollination is complete, it loses its scent.
A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose (by poetess Gertrude Stein)
Very expensive essential oil most people cannot afford to purchase.
However, you can find a blooming rose bush and start inhaling. You will receive a true, pure, unadulterated rose oil directly from the flower itself. You will also enjoy the visual beauty . By caressing the flowers gently with your fingers and by letting your nose and face come into contact with the velvet surface of the petals, you will experience the rose with three senses. Some people even eat rose petals, thus engaging the sense of taste, taking trace of the oil internally.
The Way to a Bug’s Heart is Thru Its Belly
Pollen, rich in protein, serves an excellent food for many insects
Nectar – mainly sugar water. Plants that produce nectar don’t use it themselves.
Peony blooms secrete an oily juice containing saccharides (sugars) that attract sweet-eating ants.
Sex In advertising
The first to employ sex in advertising were not people. It was plants. In order to attract insects to pollinate them, plants’ most common device is to produce oily compounds that imitate sexual pheromones. These imitation pheromones comprise many of the fragrances we have in essential oils which have been the foundation of the perfume business for thousands of years.
My (Eugeniya’s) favorite is Ylang Ylang.
Bees as the First Aromatherapists
Not all orchids invite moths to provide their pollination needs. There are some 600 species of orchids that enlist the aid of bees for pollination. They are called “bee orchids”. There is also a corresponding group of bees, called “euglossine bees”.
Euglossine bees come in about 175 brightly colored species in five genera. They are not like honey bees. Their specialty is in collecting fragrance chemicals (i.e. essential oils). The male bees, that is. When a male bee comes to visit an orchid he begins by emitting a blend of his own oils onto the oil droplets of the orchid. The bee’s lipid oil gland is in his head and acts as a solvent to facilitate gathering up the orchid’s oil secretions. Using brushes on his front pair of feet, he scrubs the plant surface and mops up the mixture until the mop-heads on his feet are saturated and unable to hold any more. This takes about 30 seconds. Then, hovering over the petals, he quickly transfers the accumulated perfume to storage containers in his hind legs. Amazingly, the chambers within the hind legs then separate the bees solvent oils from those of the flowers and return it to the bee’s head for reuse. What remains in the hind leg pouches is pure orchid oils.
After working for a time at the bee then begins to act strangely, slipping and falling down, as if he were drunk and out of his head in ecstasy. This may go on for an hour or more, as the bee blissfully enjoys the fragrances it has gathered.. It appears that the fragrances that so attract the male bee imitate the sex pheromones of the females.
Meanwhile, the orchid shoots a pollen packet at the bee with considerable force, knocking him down, but ensuring that the pollen sticks to his body.
Besides the enjoyment, the male euglossine bee get longevity. Without gathering these fragrances from these flowers, the male bee have shortened life spans and reduced fertility