Scented Bed Linens

When it comes to deciding on the aroma for your bed linens, it's really a matter of personal choice. Five hundred years ago in England, lavender was a favorite and it seems to have stood the test of time. In the seventeenth century, Izaak Walton was among those yearning for it: "The linen looks white and smells of lavender and I long to be in a pair of sheets that smell so." In the nineteenth century, the English Romantic poet, John Keats, mentions the favorite again in his poem, "The Eve of St. Agnes,"…and she slept azure lidded in blanched linen, smooth, lavender'd."

The royalty of Europe had more exotic preferences. Tudor Queen Elizabeth I liked her bed linen perfumed with sandalwood. While King Henry of France liked violet. In 1480, Edward IV was having his bed perfumed with anise and orris powder and, according to a document of 1633, Queen Elizabeth of Spain went for various aromas including rose leaves, clove flowers, and coriander. At the most magnificent and luxurious palace of all time, Versailles, the Sun King himself, Louis XIV, indulged in a variety of aromas for his bed linens. Ingredients included nutmeg and cloves, and there are complex recipes, for example, benzoin boiled in rose water combined with orange flowers, jasmine, and a little musk. Louis XVI's wife, the extravagant and frivolous Marie Antoinette, had a liking for roses and violets until she met the French Revolution and the guillotine in 1793.

In days past, bed linens were perfumed by storing them with little sachets of natural fragrance. As Bullen's Bulwark of 1562 records, they were also washed in "a water of wonderous sweetness for the bedde whereby the whole place shall have a most pleasant scent." History provides some complex recipes for perfuming bed linen. If you were married to King Henry III of England in 1240, you'd be washing the sheets in violet-scented orrisroot powder, dried leaves of fragrant red roses, sandalwood, benjamin. storax, calamus root, cloves, ambergris, coriander, and lavender. From the sound of it, you'd get both passion and sleep!

For us, things are simpler, and not only because we don't have to hand-wash our linen! Simply add 3 to 6 drops of your chosen essential oil to the softener section of your washing machine. Alternatively, put 3 drops of essential oil on a piece of natural material and pop it into the tumble dryer along with the bed linen. The rose essential oils have subtle, different influences on events - rose Bulgar is romantic and sensual, rose Maroc is heavy and passionate, while Turkish rose is more gently erotic. You can use any single essential oil on its own, or make yourself an individually tailored blend. Store your special blend in a separate bottle near the wash.

Total aroma bed kits were being sold by the eighteenth-century physician, James Graham, for "couples desirous of childbearing." Above the bed was a special domelike structure that gave off the smell of a whole variety of natural aromatics while the couple lay on a mattress stuffed with, among other things, stallions' hair, rose leaves, and lavender flowers. The sheets, meanwhile, were perfumed with Tudor roses.

Of course we go to bed to sleep, too, and in England, hops were generally used for this purpose. The fruit and leaves were stuffed in pillows and as the sedative effects of hips have been used for thousands of years, they may well have had the required effect. (Not the same effect as when brewed in beer!) If you have trouble getting to sleep, I suggest you put a couple of drops of linden blossom or chamomile essential oil on a cotton ball and place it between the pillow and pillow case. A drop under the pillow can also have a good effect, but in these instances, the aroma is confined only to one area, whereas with perfumed bed linen, the effect is all over.

Natural essential oils can handle the heat of any washing machine; in fact they thrive on it. (Twentieth-century perfumes cannot be used because they contain chemicals that can have an unpredictable effect when heated.) Alternatively, put a drop of essential oil on a small piece of absorbent natural material and then place this between the sheets in the linen closet. If you have a small porous clay pot that you can hang in the linen closet, put a couple of drops of essential oil in it and leave it there.

Whichever method you use, or aroma you choose, nature's essential oils provide a truly delightful way of making bedtime a Scentual time. We spend so much of our time in bed, let's make the most of it!