Sandalwood and the Slowness of Fragrance

Santalum album, Indian sandalwood, is a small tree — rarely taller than nine metres — native to Indonesia, the Philippines and Western Australia. Carried across the Indian Ocean by Austronesian traders more than three thousand years ago, it took root in southern India and became so closely tied to the subcontinent that most people now think of it as native there.

Only the heartwood carries the fragrance, and it takes its time: the oil — nearly 90 percent santalol, the compound responsible for sandalwood’s warm, milky scent — develops after about a decade and reaches its full strength only after twenty years of growth. A tree cut too early yields wood with almost nothing to it.

In Hindu and Buddhist ritual, sandalwood paste and smoke have marked temples, cremations and daily devotion for millennia; in perfumery, its oil grounds fragrances from incense to eau de parfum. That combination of slow growth and constant demand has taken a toll: Indian sandalwood production fell from around four thousand tonnes a year in the early 1970s to under three hundred by 2011, and the species is now listed as vulnerable.

India responded with decades of strict export and harvesting controls — reason enough for much of today’s sandalwood incense to come from plantations rather than wild trees. What is burned in a few seconds took twenty years, at least, to become itself.