Guest Episode: Scents and Sensibility

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Today, it's all about those bowls of dried bits of leaves and flowers that used to be so popular to freshen up a room.

She's talking about potpourri, folks.

And some of our youngest listeners may not even know what this is because, honestly, it seems to have vanished.

But growing up, there was always a dish of random dried stuff that smelled vaguely floral in the downstairs guest toilet.

That's exactly where potpourri always was.

And I haven't really thought about it for decades, but the folks at Outside In have, we are running a fun guest episode from them for all of you.

If you're not familiar, Outside In is an awesome show all about the natural world and how we use it.

But you don't have to be a super outdoorsy type who spends your weekends mountain climbing and snowboarding and whitewater rafting.

You can just be someone who's interested in such random but fascinating questions as whether animals get seasonal allergies too, or how much bigger New Hampshire would be if you flattened out the mountains.

Spoiler, still pretty tiny.

But they also tackle big questions like why did the community that lived on Easter Island collapse?

Can ecotourism be actually eco?

And if that's not big enough, what is the origin of life itself?

All very good reasons to subscribe, which you should do.

But first, you know you want to get to the bottom of this potpourri mystery.

How did something that started as fermented mush in Victorian England turn into pine cones in American suburbia?

And who's still making potpourri today?

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Hey, Justine Paradise.

Hey, Taylor Quimby.

Do you ever remember, you know, something from your childhood that at the time seemed totally normal?

Like, you know, just the way the world is.

But then in retrospect, you look back and find it totally and utterly baffling.

I mean, I guess, like,

low-rise jeans, completely unacceptable at this point, you know, for me.

A lot of fashion feels that way when you look back at it.

Yes, but low-rise jeans in particular, like, cut you off in a deeply uncomfortable way.

Like sitting is uncomfortable.

I personally find the high-rise just much more flat.

Like, it just doesn't make any sense that they would be low-rise.

Okay.

Yeah, well, I can't speak to that one, but I will tell you that for me, that thing is potpourri.

Potpourri.

Like, I remember once picking up a bowl of potpourri on a side table in my living room and just thinking,

like, why?

Why?

Like,

what is this?

And I have since polled some of our Gen X and elder millennial colleagues, and I have confirmed that I am not the only one.

Do you remember potpourri being like a big thing in the 80s and 90s?

Yes.

Potpourri was everywhere.

Weird herbs and bits in a bowl.

Top of the toilet, you know, coffee table, everywhere.

I mean, I don't know.

To me, it's sort of like this sort of Reagan era.

It's morning again in America.

The same time that like Pac-Man was big.

I will say, however, that the potpourri trend doesn't seem to have infiltrated every home in this era.

I don't want to say it was mostly white people, but certainly in my experience it was.

I never had it at my house because my dad got a headache from anything that smelled funny.

And the first time I saw it at my friend's house, I was like,

what was this?

And I took a bite out of it.

It did not taste good.

Nick took a bite out of it?

What would you list just in terms of the types of ingredients that you might find in a bowl of potpourri?

What kinds of things?

Dead flowers.

Dried rose petals is like the go-to.

Cloves.

Cinnamon sticks.

Beans or peas.

Little bits of wood.

Wood chips.

Like little sticks.

Tiny pine cones, which are quite cute, actually.

Dried orange peel.

Dried orange pieces.

That's what I tried to eat.

It was terrible.

I do feel like it's like the word salad where it's just like anything can go in a salad, you know?

The thing about potpourri, though, is that it wasn't just sort of a quiet home decor fad that we've all forgotten about.

Like it really broke into mainstream culture.

Before I saw it in anybody's house, I just knew it as a category in Jeopardy that sort of meant everything.

Categories?

Potpourri.

Potpourrie.

It's potpourri.

Potpourri.

People love potpourri.

Do you like the marias?

It smells so good up here.

I wish you could smell.

I'm going to send some of the smell up there.

And I also remember the commercials, like the Glade commercials, right?

It's Glade Potpourri and Spray.

All very sexist, now that I think about it.

Yeah, I remember this episode of Friends when the entire joke of the episode is how girly potpourri is.

What What is with these chips you bought?

No, no, no, no, no, no, it's potpourri.

You're supposed to smell it.

I mean, it seemed like a sort of ubiquitous mom-aunt gift.

Roughly coincided with the rise of too many throat pillows on your couch.

You know, sort of incense without the like sort of counterculture.

The freshness of potpourri now in a pump.

Spray it, shake it, or pump it.

And yet,

when I think about it,

I feel like potpourri compared to all these other things from the 80s and 90s just isn't associated with the era in the same way.

But I'll say this, with all the pandemic home crafting going on, I have been clued into the fact that there is this very quiet potpourri revival going on.

And it's got me asking all these questions.

Like, what's the deal with potpourri?

Why did it get here?

And why does anybody particularly think it's a great idea?

Where did it come from?

It would be cursor to learn when it really phased out.

Wherefore art thou, potpourri?

Wherefore art thou, potpourri?

Potmouie!

Potlarie!

Potpourie!

Yeah, you gotta fall to your knees in the rain when you say this.

You ask the hard questions, Taylor, always in your journalism.

That's what I do.

This is Outside In, a show about the natural world and how we use it.

I'm Justine Paradise.

On today's episode, Taylor Quimby brings us scents and sensibility.

Once upon a time, potpourri was used as a natural way to freshen up a space.

Now, for some, it seems a bit like the lava lamp of fragrance, an outdated fad from a bygone era.

Or is it?

Did the potpourri trend dry up?

or just evolve?

In this episode, we're tracking the scent of potpourri from its origins in the Victorian era through the potpourri boom of the 1980s and all the way to today.

It's an oversimplistic stereotype that the Middle Ages in Europe smelled bad.

Yes, there would have definitely been some particularly pungent odors, but people really cared about smell.

So there's rosemary, there's lavenders, there's oreganos.

There's a lot of fragrance happening in there.

Sweet Elyssum, which has just got a beautiful honey scent.

And that's why a flower called Rosa Gallica, or the Apothecary's Rose, was the most popular, most coveted variety of rose in Europe for hundreds, maybe thousands of years.

They're just intoxicating.

Like you just, you have to stop and smell the roses.

Like you really, truly cannot pass by them without leaning over and smelling them.

This is Yvette Weaver, an assistant horticulturalist at the Met Cloisters, which is essentially a medieval monastery, or a museum designed to look like one, at the northern tip of Manhattan.

There are unicorn tapestries, frescoes, stained glass, and a medieval garden.

with plants historically used as medicine, as poison, for cooking, and those used especially especially for scent.

And there's one I want to talk about in particular, the apothecary's rose.

This sweet, honey fragrance that I really say it's like medicine for the soul.

Like you really,

you want that in your body.

Here's Yvette's colleague, Carly Still, managing horticulturalist at the Met Cloisters.

The smell of the Apothecary's Rose, well, it's right there in the name.

It was the basis of an entire industry.

The main ingredient of many an apothecary product.

Rose water or rose honey or the rose petals just sprinkled in drawers.

They could be sort of molded into little rosary beads.

Get it?

Rosary beads?

Anyway, the apothecary's rose was also the basis of, you guessed it, potpourri.

Early potpourri was made in a fermentation process that by today's standards might be considered pretty unpleasant.

It was almost like floral compost.

Over the course of spring and summer, one might keep tossing in petals or spices.

The mixture would wilt and rot until the sickly sweet smell became almost nauseating.

The process sounds a little like cooking, and you know, it's fermentation, so it kind of was.

Which makes sense then when you look at the history of the word potpourri, which initially was a French translation for a category of Spanish or Portuguese meat stew.

And what it translated to was a rotten pot.

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Victorian potpourri is described as a gray, wet, sometimes moldy mixture.

It wasn't meant to be used for decoration, rather, it was a natural perfume, an olfactory snapshot of spring, preserved and hidden in special perforated jars that released the scent without revealing the contents.

The 19th century version of a Glade plug-in.

I wanted to see for myself what Victorian-era potpourri might have looked and smelled like.

So I looked for a recipe.

The oldest one I could get my hands on came from an 1895 book called Sweet Scented Flowers and Fragrant Leaves.

The following mixture is said to retain its fragrance for 50 years.

Gather early in the day, when perfectly dry, a peck of roses.

Pick off the petals and strew them over three quarters of a pound of common salt.

The recipe calls for a peck of rose petals, which is about two and a third gallons.

I did my best converting measurements down for the two pints of petals I plucked from a standard grocery store bouquet.

We're gonna need a bigger bowl.

Oh my god.

I'll put the recipe on our website, but basically, you lay freshly plucked petals over gobs and gobs of salt for a few days.

Once they've begun to moisten and wilt, you add cloves, allspice, more salt, brown sugar,

something called oris root powder, made from the roots of an iris and used to soak up and preserve the smell of the roses.

And my favorite ingredient, brandy.

It says to add one gill of brandy, but I don't know what a gill is.

A gill is a quarter of a pint.

We will be doing cavassier.

A little for me.

Oh, that smells awful.

That's my son, Phineas.

He's 10.

At first, the mixture looked rather pretty.

The petals were turning a rich shade of raspberry.

The spices gave them a gritty, pulpy look.

But as time went on, juices seeped to the bottom of the Tupperware, which is ruined forever, by the way.

And the petals darkened to a deep burgundy wine.

And eventually, the color of blood and dirt.

This is not what I had in mind.

I dropped a jar off with Justine to take a look.

It looks like a pile of stewed meat.

Like giant wet craisins.

Used bandages.

But still wet.

Wow.

Put that on your coffee table and smell it.

But even stranger than the look was the smell, which to me anyway, well, let's just say it gave me a migraine.

But before you open that jar, I just, I'm a little worried about you actually, because I know that you're in your closet and it's a small space, and that is a powerful jar of

intense smelling potpourri.

Like, do not stick your nose in that jar.

Oh, really?

Okay.

I would have done that.

So do not do that.

You will.

not do it.

You'll be out of commission for the rest of the day.

Jesus Christ.

Okay.

Okay.

I'm like nervous.

I'm going to open the closet door.

You know, if you want to, if you want to bring your mic outside, I think that would be fine.

I'll be okay.

No.

I don't think this is that bad.

How good?

Oh, I'm so pleased to hear that.

It kind of smells like

cider.

Hmm.

What you're probably smelling is the brandy.

Oh.

Because the roses themselves just weren't that fragrant.

Oh.

Yeah, so that makes sense.

Like, this is not the apothecary's rose.

Right, right.

I'm sure I could have gotten them if I really wanted to work at it and spend a bunch of the radio station's money.

But, you know, for this story, I just went to the grocery store and this is what you can get.

Well, I actually think that you did a nice nice job.

And I think, I don't know how you would present this potpourri, because it is true that

it doesn't look great.

But maybe that's just in the eye of the beholder.

Like, I don't know.

I can see it having its place.

So, how did potpourri go from this, the rotten pot, to something so popular it became an iconic object of the 80s?

Oh, it smells great.

Popular enough even to be made by Martha Stewart.

Here's some more lemon peel.

Look at this.

Isn't that a beautiful color?

You can do your own lemon peel.

You just peel the lemon and dry it.

And lemons are beano leaves.

Well, the famed apothecary's rose, the one I substituted for cheap flowers from the produce section, is a perfect flower for sweet-smelling potpourri.

But when you breed a flower for smell, there are sometimes trade-offs.

Their bushes are a little stubbier, the stems not so long, and you have to catch them at just the right time.

Again, here's Yvette Weaver.

That period of time that it's blooming is much shorter than, you know, our newer roses just in general.

And so in the 19th and 20th centuries, breeders started experimenting with other varieties.

Roses that bloomed longer and more regularly, and roses that could be cut, shipped, and shown around the world.

The apothecary's rose fell out of favor, and what took its place had plenty to swoon over, but not as much to smell.

Here's Carly still.

Roses that we find in the florists are just like sort of packed and packed with petals, but without the fragrance side of it.

And I suspect that's one of the reasons moist potpourri is a thing of the past.

I mean why bother with a wet time-consuming process if the whole point is to capture a smell that's barely there?

Over the 20th century potpourri recipes stopped calling for a process of flower fermentation and started incorporating pre-dried flowers instead.

You might be able to guess a few of the reasons.

Not only was the apothecary's rose less available at this time, the recipe would have been less messy, a little nicer to look at, and less time-consuming.

So the question becomes: how did it get everywhere?

At least, everywhere in 1980s middle-class America.

I don't even believe it's real.

That potpourri isn't real, is it?

It's like the carnation of room fresheners, right?

Like the smell is not just from dried flowers.

Isn't it also perfume in there?

Well, that's a story best explained by someone who's been dubbed the Queen of Potpourri, one of the biggest bulk manufacturers of the stuff during its heyday, Lois Moute.

I was in the potpourri business from 1980 till 2006.

In the early 1970s, popular tastes in smells were starting to shift.

So people got a little tired of Glade.

I'd like to introduce you to Glade's new air freshener, Sunny Leonard.

The environmental movement was taking off, and potpourri was becoming a fashionable and quote-unquote natural trend for high-end consumers.

And the big cosmetics and fragrance companies wanted in on the heretofore rather niche potpourri game.

The thing is, these companies already made perfume.

They had the smell part taken care of.

So they would come with the packaging, they would come with the name, they would come with the fragrance, and they would tell me makeup potpourri.

Law's clients included big brands like Mary Kay, Revlon, and Avon.

And they'd come to her with very specific ideas in mind.

Not only did they already have the perfume, they'd have the packaging, the branding, everything.

Everything that is, but the potpourri itself.

Now, potpourri had shifted a bit already from the fermented wet potpourri of the Victorian era to a dried product, one easier to produce, transport, and sell.

But it still wasn't mass market.

It was still what I call the class market.

You know, the potpourri was $25 $25 a bag.

The flowers were real flowers.

And they were aromatic flowers.

They were traditional flowers like lavender smells.

And it was all very cute and expensive.

And so, in order to scale up and transform potpourri from a small batch garden craft to a big batch product, Loa had to solve a couple big challenges.

Problem number one.

The classical potpourri flowers, not just roses, but lavenders and chamomiles, they were too expensive.

Problem number two, they were too fragile.

And problem number three, the plants that did smell good were actually interfering with the smells of the perfume.

The top notes are all the citrus note, all the fresh note.

The orange, the citrus, and you said, mmm, so fresh.

Forget about it.

By the time you buy the porphyries, those are gone.

We enjoyed it, not you.

Basically, if Laura wasn't careful, customers could wind up getting the aftersmell of the perfume combined with the smell smell of musty dead flowers.

So she started trying to pair fragrances that could cover the smell of botanicals with botanicals that had almost no smell at all.

A scheme that is practically the very opposite of Victorian potpourri.

The options in France were too expensive, Loa says.

So she turned to her suppliers in India.

We said to them, listen, we need

botanicals that are available in large quantity, that are sustainable even then,

that do not break when they are blended, and actually do not interfere very much with fragrances.

India had everything Loa was looking for and more.

You have a lot of forest there, and that's you have also a lot of beans, a lot of stuff coming out of the trees.

And then we also went to the foothill of the Himalayas to get all kinds of pancons.

But it wasn't just the plants.

In India, Loa could contract with local companies, companies that already had a network of rural workers helping to supply India's herbal medicine industry.

Those workers could collect, dry, and even modify botanicals for potpourri on the cheap.

Because it wasn't just the smell and look of potpourri that was being changed, it was also the color.

You know, people became more demanding, saying, Oh, but you know, can I have this pentone number?

And can I have this pentone number, which required the botanicals to be bleached, bleached, and dyed so that we had access to the pastel color?

The brands didn't literally come to Law with Pantone paint swatches, but people wanted the potpourri to match the packaging.

And so Loa had her suppliers bleach and dye botanicals in order to color coordinate, like you would with a dress or a sweater.

Potpourri was becoming an object of design, a product that reflected not the seasons, but the fashion seasons.

And all that was done in India because the labor is cheap, the land is fairly available where it was made,

it was very convenient.

I reached out to a botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew to ask whether the foreign ingredients being used for potpourri during this time were sustainable.

He told me that on the whole, yeah, they are.

But he did have concerns about labor.

In India, rural workers like these have often been exploited or underpaid.

And much of the potpourri boom came before the birth of the modern fair trade movement.

Loa sent me a few photos from India of dyed plants laid on the ground in in fast, colorful carpets, workers in black rubber gloves dunking bowls of dried bean pods into bleach or lotus leaves into yellow dye.

It wasn't a factory per se, but this was also not a cottage industry.

And it is wild to think that this operation was for a product as quaint and unassuming as bags of potpourri.

Regardless, Even those Indian botanicals were not cheap enough to properly scale up.

In the 1990s, Loa started taking on bigger and bigger orders, eventually landing a contract to make and deliver 6 million bags of potpourri, which is one for every human being in Denmark.

As the demand for potpourri ballooned and went to Target, Walmart, and all those mass market companies,

we had to find something else to fill those potpourri and also to lower the price.

And here came the wood cones and the wood shaving.

Wood shavings made from common pine harvested in Arkansas and North Carolina.

If you cut it in a certain way, it's like butter.

You know when you pull the butter with a knife and it curls?

Right.

Well, that's a wood cone.

Essentially, we are talking about the same stuff you put in the bottom of a hamster cage.

And it was in this way that the potpourri trend of the 20th century began to take its final form.

Instead of bags filled with small bits and pieces from flowers and leaves, this potpourri was a handful of bulky but lightweight statement pieces popped into a bag.

You would see a wood cone, you would see a curly pod, you would see a cotton pod, you would see some staranis, you would see...

So it makes a very clean potpourri.

Lo and others had transformed potpourri into something that the Victorians wouldn't even have recognized.

It was bleached and dyed, a mix of imported fruit pods and shavings from pine trees.

Loa's potpourri was mixed in stainless steel blenders so an adult human could fit inside.

And to make it smell good, fragrance was sprayed into the blender with an honest-to-goodness paint sprayer.

It was big, it was like a concrete blender, you know, one of those huge things.

And all in stainless steel inside and Teflon, it was great.

You could clean it like a whistle.

So that is the story of how potpourri bloomed and transformed during the boom of the 1980s and 90s, before rather suddenly drying up in the 2000s.

And then the sticks came, the scented sticks, fitted very well with the minimalist decors and kind of stuff that

most people have now.

And

the potpourri became again a specialty item.

So what about potpourri today?

Why am I talking about potpourri in 2021?

The moss is just, you know, real earthy, and I'm telling you, earthy.

Hey man,

I like the smell of dirt.

That's coming up after a break.

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This is Outside In, a show about the natural world and how we use it.

I'm Taylor Quimby, and today I have been talking, as you know, about Potpourri.

What I've come to appreciate about Potpourri, having reported this story, is that it isn't really anything in particular.

It's just an idea, a mixture of things that may or may not belong together.

It reminds me of those scented candles, warm summer breeze, or crisp fall night.

There are no hard and fast rules to potpourri.

And maybe there never were.

The word that once referred to Portuguese stew, and then to the smell of a bathroom air freshener, is used today to refer to literally anything, a potpourri of poetry, or a jeopardy category for misfit questions.

And so in this half of the episode, I want to introduce you to three people that are making potpourri, or something like it, all their own.

And I'm going to start with Autumn.

You can use my whole name.

It's Autumn HUDNUT, Anderson.

So how about that?

It's HUDNUT.

Can you believe that's my maiden name?

I found Autumn in one of the modern world's biggest potpourri markets, Etsy.

There are all kinds here.

Straight up floral potpourries, potpourries with little holiday decorations.

Autumn has some of the most interesting mixtures on the site.

Tublau honey and maple, apple, bourbon.

You can't help but notice trends.

Based on my experience scrolling Etsy, a lot of the potpourri being sold today does seem to be made by white ladies in the American South, but autumn in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan has been doing it longer than most of them.

1979, spellbound since 1979.

Ew, that is, that's a serious 42 years.

Not supposed to add it up.

I have made potpourri out of leather, straps, and

just everything.

It's an obsession.

It's really an obsession.

What's the weirdest, what's the weirdest thing you've ever put in your dehydrator just to try it out?

Well, I dehydrated some

I shouldn't say this, I'll get in trouble, some bumblebees that were were

very annoying to us, just a couple, just two.

They were pollinators.

They were wood bees that eat your house.

And

they dehydrated rather nicely.

Autumn says that the late 70s and 80s were potpourri heaven.

But then suddenly the business dried up.

She persisted and continued trying to hawk her wares at the local Renaissance fair in Upper Michigan.

And she says the past five years, even before the pandemic started, potpourri has been making a comeback.

Everybody would tease me, like, oh, you're bringing out your potpourri jars again.

Nobody buys it, they don't even know what it is.

And everybody would go look past it.

But I just love this stuff.

So I'd bring it, and

we'd get a few sales, and that was about it.

And then they started buying more and more, and then buying gifts.

And then I went online, and so now they buy me online.

Now I have probably 26 varieties.

I had to buy a whole nother shop at the festival.

One of the most popular varieties she has leans on a weird trend that I have seen elsewhere lately.

Moss in a bowl.

Autumn's been collecting moss and ferns and mushrooms and packaging it as a rainforest potpourri.

And it's killing it with the younger crowd.

I'm telling you, I haven't been able to make enough of it.

People like it.

It smells like dirt.

Honest to God, it smells like dirt.

I've got cedar and sweetgrass, and I have this dirt scent, and

the moss is just, you know, real earthy.

It's gotten so much attention that

Maker's Mark

had me make a whole bunch of potpourri for their one of their ads.

Oh my gosh.

And they put their newest Maker's Mark bottle in it and then sent it to their advertisers.

And the first thing the lady wanted to know is if I could make it smell even more dank.

It was a fun project.

Did you get any free whiskey?

No!

I didn't.

Yeah, that's a shame.

Autumn's potpourri breaks the mold, so to speak.

It reminds us that while you might want to make sure you're not collecting anything endangered or poisonous, the no-rules nature of potpourri is a type of freedom.

If the stuffy bathroom bowls of the 80s weren't your thing, it doesn't mean that there's not a mix for you now.

It is in full regalia down here.

We are full of dogwoods and maple trees in bloom and cherry blossoms and all of the goodness of the south.

And

it's...

So the next person I want to introduce you to is named ednita tingle adnita is the owner of roots and blooms floral and gifts in atlanta i asked her to jump on a zoom call with me way back when i started to do this story so she could give me some tips on drying stuff i got from my local florist and i want you to channel her absolute adoration for plants if i could see that stem again i think he gave you spiral eucalyptus

oh wow look at that see we don't even have that down here

that particular variety of you look at that I love it.

Because truth be told, Edita's not really a potpourri kind of person.

You remember like the turquoise blue potpourri?

Like, what?

Why is that blue?

But she is all about getting more out of the same flowers you put in a vase.

Drying them, watching how they cycle through the seasons.

She's even been doing workshops, how to take dried plants and make a sort of non-holiday wreath.

Things like yarrow, thistle, broom corn.

Wait, I have a list.

I actually prepared myself my best NPR.

Like, I'm such an NPR person.

Anyway, I have a list.

So for her, potpourri doesn't have to live in a bowl.

It doesn't have to be dyed or scented.

Let those flowers turn golden.

Watch how they change.

So what I encourage people to do is to sort of go outside and to kind of forage a little bit what's naturally present.

And allowing those things to go through their life cycle a bit and see how they preserve.

You'll see a way to bring outside In no matter what season.

I don't know if you remember from my email, but the name of our show is actually Outside In.

So

that was like a marketing tagline you just gave us.

Yes!

I'm here for the win.

That's awesome.

When we reimagine the word potpourri and understand its original intent, we can reimagine it today, right?

Make it, make it new, make it fresh in a wreath, and it will do that magical thing that flowers do, which is just make you happy.

And finally, I want to introduce you to someone who is making some old-fashioned potpourri, the dried kind, not fermented, from backyard roses plucked and packaged as a pandemic sidekick.

You get seven months into a global pandemic without work and you start saying, well, perhaps we have to adapt.

This is Paulus.

He's a cabaret performer in England, somewhat famous for his role as the tough judge in a British reality TV talent show.

It's called All Together Now, and the gimmick is that there are 100 judges, each one from a different creative discipline.

During every performance, judges stand to indicate their approval.

Paulus rarely gets out of his chair.

Well done.

It's my massacre, 97% of you liked him.

But not everyone did, Paulus.

Come on, Paulus.

You didn't stand up for that.

And most of the hundred did.

Why did you not stand up?

No, I didn't stand up.

Not that it wasn't good, Jody.

It was good, but for me, there were too many trills and licks and flicks.

It didn't work for me.

Did not work for Paulus.

Not much does, so don't worry.

I get the impression Paulus is actually something of a softy.

He says the show's producers encouraged his role as hard to impress.

We know that these things are a game show and there's a game to play.

And I played the game just like the contestants did.

Like a lot of performers, Paulus had a really hard time during the pandemic.

Like thousands of other

freelance creatives, I lost thousands of pounds worth of work overnight.

And it wasn't just financial hardship.

Paulus is the kind of person who lives for stagecraft.

So he didn't just lose income.

He lost some of his sense of purpose.

You know, I haven't had a round of applause for a really long time.

And

I'm sad to say that

it's something I,

well, I think it's something I need or have needed.

It's something I definitely expect.

And it's very weird without it.

I know that none of that is very healthy or adult, by the way, but it's just the truth.

And so during the tough months of COVID lockdowns, which it's worth reminding were a lot tougher in the UK, he started selling potpourri made from the David Austin roses he grows in his garden.

So basically, my house is now covered

full of buckets.

I don't know if you can see this.

I know you can't hear it, but

buckets full of

roses

of different varieties.

And they go in the bucket after they're properly dried.

Paulus knows potpourri is a bit cheesy.

But he's a cabaret performer, and sometimes cheese is part of the act.

I guess the 80s was the last time in the UK that potpourri was cool.

But it's more than that.

For him, there's a certain kind of belonging in potpourri.

Paulus grew up not knowing how to talk to his peers in school, at the bus stop.

And instead, he made friends with the older ladies who ran his local amateur theater club.

So I just hung out.

with older ladies and cups of tea and scones and things like potpourri and you know raffles and things like that they were my life and there was a comfort to these people, these older people, that I didn't get from people of my own age.

And this past year, Paul has spread that comfort to his fans during a time when he couldn't perform the way he used to, the way he needed to.

So yeah, I have felt loved.

I have felt loved by complete strangers.

from different corners of the globe.

And

if they want to show their love by buying my potpourri,

even if that's just a pity purchase, I feel that love and I take that love and I thank them for it.

Back in the rotten pot days of potpourri, it was especially organic.

I don't mean organically farmed or anything.

I mean that it was like literally decaying.

It was funky.

And it was slow.

You tended it like a campfire, throw in a few more petals here, some salt there, give it a stir every now and again.

The people who made potpourri were brewing something up that seemed to have a purpose.

The potpourri of the 1980s, that had a purpose too, but it was something else, an aesthetic, an object of fashion.

And that,

that is what went out of style at the turn of the century.

Today, it seems like people are taking what they want from the past and making something different, something new.

Now, everybody gets to decide what potpourri is and what it means to them.

I think I prefer to think about it like Paulus does.

Potpourri is a vehicle for love or joy, something that makes you want to stop and smell the roses, regardless of how fragrant they actually are.

Justine, I want you to have that little jar of potpourri.

Really?

This is for me?

Yeah.

Aw, it's for you.

It's a gift.

Thanks, Taylor.

You're welcome.

I'm really so glad you like it because I was going to give it to you either way.

And I would have to be like, ah, gift horse.

Yeah, thanks.

No, it's really nice.

This episode of Outside In was produced by Taylor Quimby and it was edited by me, Justine Paradise.

We had additional editing support from Felix Poon, Jessica Hunt, and Rebecca Lavoie, who is also our executive producer.

Special thanks to all of the NHPR folks who dished for our potpourri memory montage.

Nick Caparice, Josh Rogers, Emily Quirk, Patricia McLaughlin, Rick Danley, and again, Rebecca Lavoie.

Also, a special thanks to Dr.

Rosalind LePierre, Mark Desbett, Kimberly Marshall, and Esther Marie Jackson.

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Additional music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions and Ben Nestor.

Don't forget we are a production of a public radio station.

So please consider donating to support the show.

You can offer your monetary donation at outsideinradio.org, but we suppose you could also express your support with a handmade jar of potpourri.

Outside In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.