In Part 2 of her interview, Enfleurage owner Trygve Harris discusses the ethics of sourcing agarwood, the challenges of pleasures of living in Oman, and her modern enfleurage project in Colombia. You can find Part 1 here.

In your FAQ and articles on the Enfleurage website, you make it clear that the aromatics trade is politically and ethically complex. It’s sometimes difficult to tell where exactly something is coming from, and you often deal with regions that are rife with conflict. Can you talk about a difficulty you’ve faced?

Yeah, I’ve gotten pretty cynical over the years, whether it’s finding what “organic” might mean in Nepal, or just being in New York. You might find that everyone is screaming “endangered species” just because everyone else is, or that we all accept a line of BS just because we want to. Sometimes you have to keep looking and follow your hunch.

I am probably best known for agarwood. It was (and still is) on all the lists, as endangered and overharvested etc. Believe me it was weird to be on the other side of the environmental argument. It was not comfortable at all. I don’t know that we all resolved it to mutual satisfaction as I still hear all about this “sustainable harvest” oil, but it’s very complex.

My argument was basically that we are losing the forests of SE Asia despite, not because of agarwood, although the wild supply in Laos is pretty well finished…

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I first heard of Trygve Harris and her West Village shop, Enfleurage, from a friend who is nearly religious in his devotion to rare aromatics. He spoke of the integrity of her sourcing and the quality of her product in hushed, respectful tones. I visited the store on my next trip to New York, but it wasn’t until my first newsletter arrived that I understood the Harris magic.

“I could pray to this flower. I might pray to this flower! Ok, I did pray to this flower!” she wrote about frangipani oil from a farmer in India. Then I looked at the website: “This is the rawest and most volatile of the oudhs,” she wrote, about Agarwood Hindi Birrin. “He is like a wild young man, completely out of control. […] though he might make you uncomfortable, there is something alluring and seductive about him, even if you feel a little weird about it afterward.” All right then, I thought, this woman is one of us.

I began following Harris’ blog just as her modern enfleurage project in Colombia yielded the world’s first commercially available gardenia oil in seventy years….

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