Saturday Seasonal: One Day to Double Ninth — Chrysanthemum Tea, a Pungent Sprig & a Rosemary-Lime Blend

Tomorrow is the ninth day of the ninth moon. Across much of East Asia, families will climb a hill, pour a cup of chrysanthemum tea, and think about the people they wish were standing beside them.

Double Ninth, and the Sprig Everyone Wore

Double Ninth (Chung Yeung in Hong Kong, Chongyang on the mainland) falls on Sunday, October 18 this year. Nine is a lucky “yang” number, so the ninth of the ninth is doubly so. The old customs are simple: climb somewhere high, drink chrysanthemum wine or tea, and tuck a sprig of zhuyu into your hair or sleeve. In Taiwan, the day is also Senior Citizens’ Day, a day for honoring elders. The most famous poem about it was written by Wang Wei when he was just seventeen and far from home. He pictures his brothers on the hilltop, every one of them wearing the sprig, “and one person missing.” Thirteen hundred years later, it is still the line people quote.

What Chrysanthemum Tea Actually Smells Like

Here is the part almost nobody explains. That bittersweet, slightly medicinal note rising from a cup of chrysanthemum tea is not really “floral.” Lab analyses of chrysanthemum flower oil keep finding the same few molecules near the top of the list: camphor, borneol, 1,8-cineole and alpha-pinene. Rosemary is built from almost exactly that family, with 1,8-cineole, camphor and alpha-pinene as its three main parts. So in the bottle, rosemary is the chrysanthemum’s closest scent cousin. And the zhuyu sprig? It is most often identified as evodia, a pungent member of the Rutaceae, the same plant family as the lime tree.

A Double Ninth Blend: 7 : 3

Put 7 drops Rosemary and 3 drops Lime into your Nebulizing Diffuser®. The rosemary is the steam off the teacup: herbal, cool and a little bitter. The lime is the sprig on your sleeve, a bright green snap of the citrus family. Bernoulli’s Principle turns both into a dry, fine mist with no heat, so the crisp top notes stay crisp instead of going flat. If you’d like to know which rosemary profile leans most camphor-forward, our rosemary chemotype guide walks through it.

If there’s someone missing from your hilltop this year, pour them a cup anyway, and give them a call.
Warmly,
Chad