The Notes
Juniper
Juniper is the small northern conifer whose blue-black berries flavour gin, and its oil smells cold, resinous and piney, with a peppery edge.
Juniper smells cold, resinous and piney, with a peppery bite and a faint sweetness underneath: the smell of gin before anyone has added the tonic. Perfumers know it as juniper berry oil, distilled from the fruit of the common juniper, Juniperus communis.
Where it grows
The common juniper has the widest range of any woody plant, spread through the cool temperate north of the world. In Scotland it is one of the native conifers, a shrub or small tree of the understorey in the old Caledonian pinewoods. It grows over most of the country but is common only in the Highlands, especially the drier east around the Cairngorms. It has declined badly in Britain, worn down by grazing deer and rabbits and by moorland burning, and is now a plant of conservation concern.
The berries are not berries at all. They are small cones whose fleshy scales have fused into a ball barely half a centimetre across. They take some eighteen months to ripen from green to blue-black under a waxy bloom, so a single bush carries two seasons of fruit at once.
Gin
The word gin comes from genever, and genever from the Latin for juniper. The connection is written into law: under the spirit drink rules that apply in the EU, and largely mirrored in the UK, gin must be flavoured with juniper berries of Juniperus communis and must taste predominantly of them.
What it smells like
Juniper berry oil is made by steam-distilling the crushed ripe berries. Its main constituent is alpha-pinene, typically between a fifth and a half of the oil, with myrcene, sabinene and limonene. Alpha-pinene is also the molecule most responsible for the smell of pine: woody, piney and turpentine-like, with a cool, slightly camphorous lift. It is a shared molecule, which may be why juniper and pine sit so easily together. The berry oil is softer than oil from the twigs, and less resinous than pine itself.
How perfumers use it
Juniper usually works at the top or heart of a fragrance, bringing clarity and a dry freshness that carries citrus down towards the woods. It is often paired with lavender, rosemary and black pepper, and settles well over cedarwood and vetiver. The family reaches further than gin. Virginia cedarwood oil, distilled from the eastern red cedar, comes from a juniper, Juniperus virginiana, and not a true cedar (more on cedarwood). Cade oil, one of perfumery’s smoky materials, comes from the wood of another, the prickly juniper.
In our fragrances
Highland opens with juniper berry and Scots pine needle, cold and resinous, with black pepper: a walk across the moor at the end of the season. Wild heather and lapsang tea follow, then peat smoke, guaiac wood and damp moss. The Library keeps a cousin in its base, Virginia cedar. The Discovery Set holds all six to try side by side.