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India's Sandalwood Culture

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What is sandalwood?

 

By Chelsie Vandaveer

http://ridgwaydb.mobot.org/mobot/rarebooks/page.asp?relation=QK99A1K6318831=

914B3&identifier=0460

July 22, 2004

 

The white santal (Santalum album Linnaeus) has been the source of

highly prized wood and fragrant oil since at least the fifth century

BCE. Known in the ancient Sanskrit as chandana, the wood and its

valuable oil traveled from India along the ancient Silk Roads to

Persia "sandal", to Greece "santalon", and to Rome "santalum". Perhaps

best known in stick incense form, sandalwood ground into a paste is

rolled around bamboo skewers. ("Sandalwood" Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911)

 

The white santal is one of 8 or 9 species of sandalwoods ranging from

India and Australia to the Pacific Islands. The trees are evergreen

with opposite ovate leaves and hemiparasitic obtaining some of their

nutrition from neighboring plants. Sandalwood is the heartwood, no

longer living, where the tree lays down secondary metabolites, in this

case, its fragrant yellow oil. When freshly cut, the heartwood is

yellowish-brown; over time, it ages to rich reddish-brown. It requires

a minimum of thirty years for the heartwood to form. The finest

sandalwood comes from trees over sixty. ("Sandalwood Case", TED Case

Studies, American University, 1997)

 

Sandalwoods in India belong to the government, a tradition since 1792

when the Sultan of Mysore declared them royal trees. In early

traditions, the white santals were uprooted and the trunks stripped of

their limbs. The logs were left on the ground until ants had eaten

away the light-colored sapwood. ("Sandalwood", A Modern Herbal, Mrs.

M. Grieve, reprinted 1996, Barnes & Noble)

 

The aged logs and roots were then collected for use—carving,

woodworking, and oil extraction. Sandalwood carvings and cabinetry

retain their fragrance; the steam distilled oil is used in perfumes,

medicinals, and cosmetics. The wood paste is one of the ingredients

for the varna (color implying caste) marks of the Brahmins, the

spiritual leaders and teachers.

 

Sandalwood oil contains α-santalol and ß-santalol, the sesquiterpene

alcohols that give the essential oil its soft, sweet fragrance. The

human olfactory nerves are specific to the scent of the santalols. If

the chirality (arrangement of the atoms in the molecule) of the

santalols is changed to the molecule's mirror image, the human nose

cannot detect the fragrance. ("Chirality and Odor Perception", John C.

Leffingwell, PhD, Leffingwell & Associates, 2001-2002)

 

U.S. Department of Agriculture on Sandalwood

http://plants.usda.gov/cgi_bin/plant_profile.cgi?symbol=SAAL16

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