AROMAPROFILES

Essential Oils And The Mind

Essential oils and human beings have a great deal in common, we are both alive - chemically, electrically and in terms of infrared radiation. Essential oils come from plants, while we ourselves rely totally on plants for our sustenance - we eat plants, and animals which eat plants, and breathe air made possible by plants. Human beings and plants are related because all living organisms are descended from the same single-cell  line. The chemical composition of DNA in plants and people is virtually the same.

Neurobiologist, Donald Kennedy. has done a detailed study of the difference between plants and animals and come to the conclusion that there is very little difference! He took tissue from a spruce tree compared it with that of a moose, the animal. Cells from both the spruce and moose have walls, both contain little organs called organelles, and both have nucleus, with its own membrane, and genetic material - DNA - the chemical composition of which is identical between spruce and moose.

Plants and humans both depend on  a chelating chemical which in humans is red heme - which transports the oxygen released from plants in the blood - and in plants it is chlorophyll. Chemically the only difference between these two is that a magnesium atom replaces an iron one. The similar composition of plants and humans may explain why essential oils, which are distillations of certain parts of certain plants, seem to act like keys to our physical and mental mechanisims.

It's becoming increasingly clear that there is still much to learn about plants. Trees might look helpless, locked to one spot in the ground, but we now know that, using chemistry, they talk to each other, defend themselves against animal invaders, and attack plant species to protect resources. Genetically, trees are very resourceful, adapting over one generation to deal with many generations of short-lived but highly adaptive insects. An old oak tree for example, could have ten branches carrying ten different genetic messages. This evolutionary advantage may help explain why some trees, like Pinus artistata, can live for over 2'000 years!

Chemically, trees are very active. When under attack from a predator they can produce extra chemicals called tannins - which deter and even kill the predator - and then distribute them to the leaves. In Africa, Professor Wouter van Hoven set about testing a variety of trees to see how much extra tannin the trees produced. He got his students to thrash the trees with sticks and belts, replicating the harsh treatment trees get from browsing deer and the like, and then he tested the increase. After fifteen minutes, Acacia caffra had increased its tannin production by 94 percent while Rhus leptodictya's went up by 76 per cent. After an hour, the off putting tannins  had increased in the leaves  of wattle  by 256 percent and the acacia by 282 per cent.

Other species show similar reactions, It took, the trees  between 24 and 100 hours  after the attack to return  to their normal chemical state. Somehow too, the trees had transmitted the news of 'predators about' to nearby trees, which also started to produce extra tannins. Because the message was relayed to the trees  not connected by their root systems, as Dr David Rhoads of the University of Washington has suggested with the red alder and sitka willow, what we may have at work here are 'airborne pheromonal substances' - chemical messengers...hormones.

As another piece of chemical wizardry, to protect their personal space, trees produce allelochemicals which insects ingest and, through their droppings, deposit on the ground around the tree, These allelochchemicals prevent other plants from growing nearby.

There is a whole chemical way of life for plants which we are only just beginning to learn about - speaking from a laboratory perspective, at least. People have for countless millennia been interacting with plants  and a knowledge has built up about the chemical movements within plants - so they can be harvested at their peak.

An essential oil could be distilled from a Jasmine flower that is one day old, or a sandalwood tree that is not less than thirty years old, some plants are harvested in the morning, some at night. And, of course, there are seasons. People have learnt to pick the plants at the optimum moment, even though they haven't understood why the particular required chemicals should be in that particular part of the plant, at that particular time. But there is more to life than chemistry, as we shall see later, and the beauty of essential oils is that whichever way you look at them, they seem to be in perfect harmony with the human organism.

Reference: The Fragrant Pharmacy: V.A.Worwood