Jasmine

Jasmine, Jasminum, is a genus of climbing shrubs bearing intensely fragrant, usually white, star-shaped flowers, native to Asia; the name comes through Persian yasmin. Many jasmines release their scent at night, opening and perfuming the dark, which shaped a symbolism of love, sensuality and the moon. In India jasmine is among the most sacred and beloved of flowers, strung into garlands for weddings, worn in the hair, and offered to deities; it is associated with love and with the god Kama, whose arrows of desire were tipped, in the poets, with jasmine and other flowers.

Jasmine flowers are picked before dawn, while their scent is most concentrated, for the perfume industry centred historically on Grasse in the south of France, and jasmine absolute, extracted by a delicate solvent process because the blossoms are too fragile for steam distillation, remains among the most expensive natural materials in perfumery, requiring a very large weight of hand-picked flowers to yield a small quantity of oil. Not every jasmine serves the perfumer or the temple: of more than two hundred Jasminum species, only a handful, chiefly Jasminum grandiflorum and Jasminum sambac, the sambac jasmine already noted for its sacred use, are grown commercially for scent, the great majority remaining ornamental or entirely undeveloped species.

Across its range jasmine holds meanings that balance the sensual with the pure: its white flowers stand for purity, grace and the divine, and jasmine is used in temple offering and in bridal adornment throughout South and Southeast Asia. The sambac jasmine is a national flower of Indonesia and of the Philippines, where it figures in devotion and in ceremony, and jasmine is woven into religious and social ritual from Persia to the Pacific. Sacred and sensual at once, the flower carries a symbolism of love, purity, devotion and the fragrant night, all drawn from the plain fact of a small white bloom that pours out its scent after dark.

The flower lent its name to recent political history: the Jasmine Revolution is the common name for the Tunisian uprising of December 2010 to January 2011, which toppled the country's long-ruling president and helped trigger the wider wave of protest across the Arab world known as the Arab Spring, a modern political usage that draws on jasmine's older association, noted above, with the country and the region rather than on any religious or ceremonial meaning. Hawaii gives sambac jasmine its own local name and story: pikake, brought to the islands in the 1880s, was named by Princess Kaiulani after the peacocks, pikake in Hawaiian, that wandered the jasmine-planted grounds of her estate, Ainahau, a nineteenth-century royal naming distinct from the flower's older Asian religious meanings.