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Famously Good

A cure for ills
April is a pungent month in the Green Mountain. From the end of March to the beginning of May, a sweetish scent pervades the narrow streets of several of the villages on the Sayq plateau, olfactory proof that an age-old tradition is alive and well. The rosewater makers of Jebel Akhdar are at work.

Jebel Akhdar is green. The mountain enjoys cool temperatures that enable local people to grow a variety of plants that cannot flourish at broiling sea level. Roses are among this number and have long been cultivated for rosewater production (as they have elsewhere in the Arab world – in fact, a bottle of rosewater is cracked open to celebrate the conclusion of the Bahrain Grand Prix). Omani rosewater is famously good, a sweet-smelling, honey-gold liquid with sundry uses, for as well as being a constituent of halwa it is also used medicinally for treating headaches, stomach pain, nervousness and sore eyes.

Sooty work
The rosewater factories
Extracting rosewater is a skilled, labour-intensive task that is limited to about five weeks of the year, when the terraced gardens of the jebel break into flower. Its production is a way of life for the people living in the few villages that make it. One venerable resident of Aqur, Salim Suleiman al Amry, says that his distilling room has been in use since he was ten years old. The room is hot as hell and dark, its walls black with soot. Tubes attached to canisters of gas snake across the floor, feeding the fires that facilitate the extraction process. In another village nearby, called Sayq, Abdullah bin Saif al Sukry uses firewood to power his stoves – a great pile of timber is stacked outside his factory – but aside from choosing different fuels both men make rosewater in precisely the same way.

Fire and vimto
Petals in the stove
The rosewater factories of Jebel Akhdar feature rectangular built-in stoves that are heated from the base by a fire. The flat top of each oven is dotted with round hollows – at first glance the effect calls to mind the hobs on an electric oven. In fact, the cavities in the stove are cylindrical and about as deep as a man’s forearm is long.

Making rosewater involves partly filling each cavity with fresh rose petals. A small metal container to collect the rosewater is then set over the flowers, followed by a shallow bowl of water on the very top to seal the hole. The petals are subsequently left to simmer away over the heat for around two hours until the rosewater has been released and is ready for collection.
In Sayq, Abdullah squats on his stove, methodically attending to each steamy hollow. When the rosewater is ready, he removes the water bowl and uses metal pincers to retrieve the second container lodged in the cavity. This rosewater is then ladled into a jar and covered with a hat-shaped basket. Later, Abdullah will transfer the liquid into terracotta containers or old Vimto bottles, which Salim also favours, bought empty from the factory. This year Salim has lost 115 bottles because the screwcaps were faulty; it is essential that new rosewater is perfectly sealed to allow the scent to develop, a process that takes around three months.

From bed to bottle
Harvesting the flowers
Rosewater making is a laborious process. Salim’s roses are watered religiously from January to the end of September, but the real slog begins only with the arrival of the flowers. During these weeks he and his fellow harvesters will rise to work at 5.30am. After firing up the stoves, Salim goes into the gardens to pick roses until 8am, after which he returns to the stoves and begins making rosewater. Children help with the harvesting, too.

In the village of Aqur, picked roses are laid out in preparation on the ground in a narrow room adjoining the stoves. Sprinkling the flowers with water and then swaddling them in cloth keeps them damp and fresh, although in nearby Sayq Abdullah prefers to leave his roses uncovered; a slick of petals gleams in the gloom next door to his stove. Both men get through the flowers at the rate of knots, but it takes a large number of roses to make a single bottle of rosewater. Salim estimates that he gets 30 bottles per day from a stove with six cavities. The current market price for one bottle is RO5.

This year the weather has been dry, according to Salim, although in April the rose bushes look to be in rude health. Trusses of buds hang on young stems stippled with fine, crimson hairs that with time will stiffen into thorns. The flowers, called warad mohammedi, spill scent into the air. Besides the birds and whirring yellow wasps the terraces are quiet, so it’s hard to imagine the furious energy being expended in factories nearby, where petals are being distilled and bottled for the future.