When someone says a scent sounds like the forest, most of the time they are speaking of three things. The bark of a tree with warm oil in it, the resin and needles of a sharp-leaved tree, and the dry heartwood lying deep in the trunk. In our workshop those three are usually called by their familiar names: cinnamon, pine and cedar.
We like telling about these three trees because they have been in people's lives long before there was a fragrance industry. We use cinnamon in the dipping bowl and in the medicine pot. Pine resin went into lamps, into glue, into instruments. Wood with a dry scent went into chests, into cupboards, into the places where things needed keeping a long time.
Cinnamon, the tree whose worth lies in its bark
Cinnamon belongs to the genus Cinnamomum, and Vietnam is one of the great cinnamon-growing places in the world, with regions whose names are familiar: Yen Bai, Quang Nam, Thanh Hoa, Quang Ngai. The strange thing about the cinnamon tree is that its value lies in the bark and not yet in the wood, so growers wait many years before stripping it, and every stripping has to be worked out very carefully.
Cinnamon bark freshly stripped is soft and damp; it curls itself as it dries, and that is exactly the shape of the cinnamon quill you see in your own kitchen. Its scent is warm, slightly sweet, with a little spice at the end, and it is the scent that makes people think of a kitchen fire and of cold days. In the workshop we work with thick lengths of bark to turn them into candle cups, and that is a long story, so we tell it separately in another piece.
Pine, the scent of resin and of needles
Pine belongs to the genus Pinus, able to live on poor soil and at altitude, so it is present across many of our hill regions. What we call the smell of pine actually comes from two places: from the resin seeping out of a wound in the bark, and from the thick layer of fallen needles covering the ground beneath the canopy.
Walk through a pine forest at sunny midday and you will find that scent thicken. That is because resin and needles release more strongly in warm weather. The scent of pine is clean, fresh, with a feeling of openness, and it is the reason many people find it easier to breathe on stepping into a pine forest without knowing why.
Cedar, the dryness that lies in the heartwood
Cedar is the common name we use for the group of woods with a dry, lasting scent, including the genus Cedrus of the high mountains and some species of the cypress family. Its scent comes from the heartwood, so it is usually the one standing last in a scent, the part that remains after the layers above have flown.
For a very long time people have used wood with this scent to make chests, cupboards and storage boxes, because it helps keep what is inside from moths and from damp. So when you smell a scent with cedar at the very bottom, the feeling of steadiness and dryness you receive is real: it comes from exactly the work that wood has done for hundreds of years.
A few questions you often send us
Why these three trees often travel together
Because they make up for one another. Cinnamon gives warmth, pine gives openness and freshness, cedar gives the dryness underneath so the scent stands longer.
What is worth saying about Vietnamese cinnamon
Vietnam is one of the world's larger growers and exporters of cinnamon, with long-established cinnamon regions in Yen Bai, Quang Nam, Thanh Hoa and Quang Ngai. This is a craft tied to the hills and to many families living there.
How does ZUNGZA use these materials
We keep at most three main directions of scent for each piece, and how they are blended is work inside the workshop. On the label you will see soy wax blended by ZUNGZA and essential oils composed by ZUNGZA.
Read more the story of the fifteen-year cinnamon tree, four forest scents in one cup, and three other familiar materials in scent.