Making Scents Out of Balsam

How nice to sit by a fire on a cold winter’s night. The fire’s warmth makes you pleasantly drowsy, even more so if it also drives into the air a woodsy aroma of balsam.

An obvious way to get this aroma is to grow balsam fir for your supply of branches. If you grow vegetables and fruits for eating, and flowers for looking at, why not grow balsam fir for smelling?

The main problem with growing balsam fir is that it’s a plant of far northern climates, so it sulks in hot summer weather. Other than that, it will grow well in sun or slight shade where the ground is very acidic and either well-drained or swampy. The tree grows slowly to become a dense pyramid, 50 feet tall with dark, shiny green, flattened needles.

If your summers are too hot for balsam fir, you could get your balsamy smell elsewhere. A few tropical trees provide that aroma, as does the relatively widely adapted sweet-gum tree. Sweet gum is not an evergreen, so it could provide winter fragrance but not winter greenery. This tree does have beautiful foliage in the fall, though.

Watch out that you don’t grow any annual balsams if it’s aroma that you want. These balsams are so only in name. One of these--garden balsam--is a relative of impatiens. Though called balsam, this plant does not have a strong aroma.

Another balsam is balsam apple, a vining cucumber relative that produces gherkin-shaped yellowish-red apples, also lacking any strong aroma.

So where does this leave you for balsamy winter greens? Seventy years ago you could have just gone out and bought a Christmas tree. Balsam fir was the most popular Christmas tree until the 1930s, when its general popularity was superseded by Scotch pine, which grows faster and holds its needles better.

You can mail-order balsam fir branches from northern New England (Maine Balsam Fir Products, P.O. Box 123, West Paris, Maine 04289; Sunrise Co. Evergreens, P.O. Box 163, Millbridge, Maine 04658.

Another way to enjoy balsamy aroma is with a balsam pillow, often available at gift stores. Such pillows are said to cure headaches, and their woodsy aroma is enduring. Fluff up a balsam pillow that is even decades old and it will release some of that wonderful aroma.