Ylang-Ylang Seeds (Cananga odorata)

Cananga odorata

Ylang-ylang, perfume tree, flower of flowers: that is what its name means in Tagalog, and perfumery proves it right. Its star-shaped yellow flowers form the heart of many great fragrances, beginning with Chanel N°5. It takes around fifty kilos of flowers to produce a single litre of essential oil, which explains its value.

Characteristics:

• Highly fragrant flowers: long and drooping, pale green before turning golden yellow at maturity, with an intense, sweet fragrance that is released mainly at night.
• Fast growth: in a tropical climate, it reaches 12 to 20 metres; in a pot, it remains much more compact.
• Decorative foliage: large, glossy leaves that make it an attractive houseplant, even when it is not flowering.

Precautions:

• A strictly tropical tree, it cannot tolerate any frost: in mainland France, it must be grown in a pot, indoors or in a heated greenhouse, with the option of placing it outdoors in summer.
• Flowering in a pot in our climates remains rare and requires a great deal of patience and warmth.

Sowing advice:

• Position: very bright, without direct scorching sunlight through glass.
• Soil: rich, humus-bearing, light and well drained. A mixture of potting soil, compost and sand works well. It appreciates high ambient humidity but dislikes stagnant water in the saucer.
• Method: unlike temperate species, this tropical seed requires no cold stratification, which would instead be harmful. Soak it for 24 to 48 hours in lukewarm water, then sow it 1 cm deep in a substrate kept constantly warm and moist (25–30 °C). Germination is slow and irregular: allow 1 to 3 months, sometimes longer.

Care advice:

• Water regularly with soft water, allowing the surface to dry slightly between waterings. Mist the foliage.
• Overwinter indoors in a warm place (never below 15 °C), reducing watering.

Benefits for biodiversity:

• In its native range, its nocturnal fragrance attracts moths and bats, which pollinate it — a typical strategy of highly scented white or pale flowers.

Uses:

• Its flowers are distilled to produce ylang-ylang essential oil, used in perfumery and soapmaking.
• In a pot, it is primarily an ornamental houseplant with exotic foliage.

Symbolism:
In the Philippines and Indonesia, its flowers are traditionally scattered over newlyweds' beds, making them a symbol of union and sensuality.

Harvesting your own seeds:
After flowering, the tree produces small green fruits that turn black when ripe, clustered in bunches. Remove the seeds from the pulp, rinse them and sow them promptly: they quickly lose their germination capacity when they dry out. See how to store your seeds.

Commitment to Quality: at SemiSauvage - Permaculture, we grow and select our seeds with respect for living things as our guiding principle. Based near the Volcanoes of Auvergne, we choose reproducible, non-hybrid varieties, test them for germination rates, and carefully sort and package them without any chemical treatment. Our belief: to give gardeners back the ability to resow, year after year, seeds that truly belong to them.

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