Texas cedarwood

Texas cedarwood is the darker cousin of the pencil wood. Where Virginia cedar is dry and clean, Texas cedar is sweeter and smokier, with a faint tar and leather quality that smells of an old fence post warmed in the sun. It is the cedar I use when a base needs smoke rather than sharpness.

What Texas cedarwood is

Texas cedarwood oil is steam distilled from the wood of Juniperus mexicana, also called Juniperus ashei, the mountain or ashe juniper that covers the limestone hills of central Texas. Like its Virginian relative it is a juniper rather than a true cedar, and its oil is built on the same cedrol and cedrene, but the balance of those molecules is different, and it carries a sweeter, smokier, more leathery profile. The oil is distilled from the wood of trees cleared from ranch land, often from old stumps and fallen timber that have seasoned for years.

Where our Texas cedarwood comes from

Ours comes from Texas, where the ashe juniper grows in dense thickets across the hill country and is harvested for oil as part of the clearing of grazing land. The tree grows slowly on thin limestone soil in a hot, dry climate, and its wood is dense and rich in oil. The Texas material is the smokiest of the cedars, and that smoke is the character of the hill country itself: dry heat, stone and old wood.

How Texas cedarwood smells

Sweet and woody, smokier than Virginia cedar, with a faint tar and leather depth and a dry, warm finish that lasts for hours. It smells of a wood that has been in the sun a long time.

Texas cedarwood in our chapters

• IIParadis de BleuThe Leaves · in the base

  In Paradis de Bleu it is the smoky cedar among the three, the note that gives the forest floor its faint memory of fire.

• VChérie OudThe Trunk · in the base

  In Chérie Oud it deepens the trunk, a smoky sweet wood beneath the vanilla that keeps the sweetness from feeling soft.

A note from the atelier

Texas cedar is smoke without ash. It gives a base the warmth of a fire that burned last night, and in Chérie Oud that warmth is what turns vanilla into wood.

Questions about Texas cedarwood