Every other flower gives one oil. Ylang-ylang gives four, sometimes five, and it gives them one after another out of the same still on the same night. As the hours pass, the lightest and most beautiful molecules leave first and the heaviest last, so the distiller stops the run again and again and sets each fraction aside as a separate grade. The first hour is the finest perfume in the world. The last is soap. It is the only flower in perfumery that is not distilled into an oil so much as sorted into a hierarchy, and to understand ylang you have to understand that it is really a family of oils wearing one name.

Not one flower. One species, two tempers, two names.

Ylang-ylang and cananga are the same tree, Cananga odorata, split into two forms by cultivation and geography. The tall, carefully tended var. genuina, grown on the islands of the Indian Ocean and in the Philippines, is distilled slowly in fractions into the fine, floral ylang-ylang of French perfumery. The hardier, coarser var. macrophylla, grown above all in Java, is distilled in a single uninterrupted run into cananga oil, cheaper, greener, heavier, and long used in soap and in Indonesian ritual. One tree, two temperaments. And in Indonesia the whole tree has a third, older name: kenanga.

The name ylang-ylang itself comes from the Tagalog ilang-ilang, and the material's grandest title, the flower of flowers, is simply that word doubled. But before the French islands made it a luxury, before it named a grade or a bottle, it was a Southeast Asian tree whose yellow, drooping, many-strapped flowers were strung into garlands and steeped into hair oil across the archipelago. The luxury came later. The flower was ours first.

One night, four perfumes.

Steam-distil ylang and something happens that happens with no other flower. The oil comes over in order of volatility, so the perfumer does not collect one oil but interrupts the run and draws off successive fractions as the night goes on. The first, richest fraction, taken in the opening hour or two, is Extra: the most volatile, the most floral, the most expensive, the grade that goes into fine fragrance. After it come First, Second and Third, each heavier, greener and cheaper than the last, until the final fraction is fit mostly for soap and cheap detergent. A full, uninterrupted distillation, all the fractions together, is sold as ylang complete.

So a single word on a label, ylang-ylang, can mean radically different things. Extra smells of jasmine, custard and banana-cream flowers, luminous and heady. Third smells flat, woody and faintly rubbery. The grade is not a mark of adulteration but of when in the night the oil left the still, and a perfumer buying ylang is really buying an hour of that night. This is the material's first secret: it is fractional by nature, and the fraction is the whole story.

"The first hour of the still is the finest perfume in the world. The last hour is soap. It is the same flower, only later."

Extra, the middle grades, and complete.

An equator of one flower.

Where rose keeps to a temperate band from Grasse to Kashan, ylang belongs to the wet tropics, and its map is a scatter of volcanic islands within a few degrees of the equator. The Philippines gave the world the flower and its name; the Comoros archipelago made it an industry; and Nosy Be, off Madagascar, and Mayotte carried it to the fine-fragrance houses of France. Same species almost everywhere, wearing the character of the island that grew it.

A medicinal trace inside a floral cloud.

The bulk of ylang is pleasant and legible. Linalool gives fresh floral lift; geranyl acetate, benzyl acetate and benzyl benzoate supply the sweet, fruity, jasmine-and-pear body; methyl benzoate and methyl salicylate add a wintergreen-tinged brightness; and a crowd of heavy sesquiterpenes, germacrene, caryophyllene and their relatives, form the woody base that dominates the later fractions. On their own these would make a fine, sweet, slightly generic floral.

What makes it ylang, and not merely a sweet flower, is para-cresyl methyl ether. In a trace it reads as narcotic, animalic, faintly banana and rubber, and it is exactly this whisper of the improper that gives ylang its heady, almost dangerous character, the quality perfumers call narcotic. Push it and the same molecule turns medicinal, tarry, close to mothball. Ylang has, in miniature, the paradox this Almanac keeps meeting: the note everyone loves the flower for is a molecule that, undiluted, nobody would call a flower at all. Beauty riding on a trace of something not quite clean.

Picked at dawn, distilled all night.

Ylang is not as ruinous as rose or jasmine, but it is still a flower of hand labour and heat. The blooms are gathered at first light, when the scent is highest, and the best are the ripe yellow flowers rather than the green; the trees are deliberately topped and bent low so a picker can reach the crop by hand. Then the distillation itself is the expensive part, because it runs not for an hour but for most of a day and night, fraction after fraction, tended the whole time.

And here the tropics give something back. Where the Damask rose blooms for three weeks a year, ylang flowers almost continuously in the warm islands, so the harvest is not a frantic fortnight but a patient, year-round picking. The cost is not scarcity of season but the length of the night in the still and the human hours around it. You are paying, above all, for someone to sit with the fire and know exactly when to change the pot.

What it actually smells like.

Good ylang is a warm, tropical, almost edible flower: banana-cream and custard over jasmine and neroli, with a spiced, faintly clove-like heat and, underneath, that narcotic medicinal hum that keeps it from ever being innocent. Extra is luminous and lifting, all top and heart; the lower grades sink toward green wood and rubber. On skin it is loud at first and then softens into a sweet, creamy, sunlit haze that can read as suntan lotion in the best sense, because so many suntan products borrowed its character. It is a flower with no cool in it at all, pure warmth, which is exactly why temperate noses find it exotic and tropical noses find it home.

The quiet engine of the great florals.

Ylang is one of the most widely used flowers in all of perfumery, often unseen, doing the work of rounding and warming other blossoms. It is a central pillar of Chanel No.5, lifting the top and marrying the aldehydes to the jasmine and rose beneath; it powers the tropical opulence of Guerlain Mitsouko and countless white-floral bouquets; it gives suntan warmth to solar and monoi accords; and it appears in the classic hair oils that made it a household smell. Where rose brings gravity and jasmine brings the animal, ylang brings the sunlight and the cream. It is the flower that makes other flowers feel warm.

From island garland to Macassar oil.

For centuries ylang was a domestic flower of the Malay and Philippine world: garlands, hair, bedding, and the scented oils of the archipelago. Its move into global perfumery came through two doors. The first was the Victorian dressing table, where Macassar oil, a hair pomade named for the port of Makassar in Sulawesi and perfumed heavily with ylang and cananga, became so popular that households draped little cloths over the backs of chairs to catch the grease, and gave the English language the word antimacassar. A flower of Sulawesi, quietly renaming the furniture of London.

The second door was the French colonial Indian Ocean. In the nineteenth century planters carried the tree to the Comoros, Mayotte, Nosy Be and Réunion, where the climate suited it and the distilleries of Grasse were hungry for it, and there the fractional distillation was refined into the grading system we still use. By the early twentieth century ylang from these islands was a fixture of French perfumery, and when Ernest Beaux built No.5 in 1921 it was island ylang doing much of the lifting. The flower had gone from a Philippine garland to the most famous perfume in the world in a single lifetime.

The flower of the threshold.

In the archipelago ylang, as kenanga, has never stopped being a ritual flower. Its blossoms go into the seven-flower kembang setaman alongside rose, jasmine and cananga for ceremonial baths, weddings and blessings; they are scattered at graves; they perfume the oil worked through a bride’s hair. In Javanese and Balinese practice kenanga is one of the flowers of every important passage, birth, marriage, death, its heavy sweetness marking the moment as set apart. To grow up in much of Indonesia is to have smelled kenanga at the doorways of your own life.

That domestic sacredness is easy to forget when the same flower is a line in a French formula. But the two are one tree. The ylang that lifts an aldehydic masterpiece and the kenanga scattered on a grandmother’s grave are the same species giving the same heady sweetness, asked to do very different work in very different rooms. The flower does not know the difference. Only we do.

What is really in your “ylang.”

Ylang is heavily reconstructed, and it is one of the more convincing rebuilds in the perfumer’s kit, because so much of its body is a handful of common esters, benzyl acetate, geranyl acetate, linalool, with a carefully judged trace of para-cresyl methyl ether for the narcotic signature and a little methyl benzoate for lift. A believable ylang can be built without a single flower, and in functional perfumery almost always is. When a fine fragrance uses a real Extra or a true complete, though, you are smelling a depth and a living unevenness that no accord quite reaches, the whole sunlit, faintly improper cloud rather than a clever sketch of it.

There is a regulatory shadow too. Ylang is rich in molecules on the restricted allergen list, benzyl benzoate, benzyl salicylate, isoeugenol, benzyl alcohol, linalool and farnesol among them, and it is a well-known cause of contact sensitivity, so its level in finished perfume is capped. A composition that leans hard on natural ylang runs into those ceilings quickly, which is one more reason the modern flower is so often part-rebuilt from permitted materials rather than poured whole from the still.

"In Java it is the flower of every doorway: birth, marriage, death. We did not discover ylang. We grew up inside its smell."

At HoM Haute we are drawn to ylang for the obvious reason and a closer one. The obvious reason is that no flower is so warm, so workable, so generous at rounding and lifting everything around it. The closer reason is memory, and it is the same reason the rose is mawar and the flower of remembrance: ylang is kenanga, the flower this country reaches for at every threshold, strung in the hair, floated in the ritual bath, scattered on the grave. For a house built on the belief that fragrance is memory, a flower that already marks the passages of Indonesian life is not a note to be bought by the hour. It is a homecoming.

Where we have used it.