What is Potpourri?

Video Transcript What is Potpourri? I'm Susan Paxton for Expert Village and we're here today talking about potpourri. There are so many different kinds of potpourri. It would be interesting to look up in the dictionary and see what potpourri means. We were talking about that earlier. But I would imagine the definition would be something of a mixture of things because in potpourri most of the time we are mixing things, we have sometimes, I make just one flavor of potpourri and other times they mix a lot of flavors together to get a different kind of scent. Some of the things that I use are rose petals, owning a floral shop I dry a lot of my own rose petals. And the leaves from the roses; they have somewhat of a scent of their own and they make good filler. One thing I do love is the smell of lavender and so I try to keep a lot of lavender handy. For potpourri as well as sashays. We'll talk about that a little bit later. I have wild orchids that are dried. Some of the things that I ...  more

Potpourri is a natural air freshener made from dried flowers, leaves, seeds and cones. Pronounced po-pur-ree, it is used to make rooms and cupboards smell fresh. Anything can be added to potpourri as long as it is dry, to ensure that the contents last longer and do not become moldy. Potpourri can be arranged in bowls or stuffed into small cotton pillows to be hung in cupboards. Other uses for potpourri include masking the smell of mothballs in cupboards and deterring insects. Sachets can be placed in drawers or in shoes to leave a fresh scent. You can place loose potpourri in ashtrays in cars and in the fillings of soft toys. Scent is also usually added to the dried flowers and can be sprayed on every few days to be absorbed into the flowers. A fixative is necessary to absorb the scent, and the most often used is orrisroot. Other types of fixative include calamus root, dry lavender, tonka bean and sandalwood bark. There are also powdered fixatives, but these are usually used in ...  more

Potpourri has been around in ancient Rome when mint leaves were placed in hot water to freshen homes. Today, potpourri is a precise blend of fragrant flowers and oils attractively wrapped to seal in the aroma and colours. Potpourri has been in use for hundreds of years and is beauty for the eyes as well as aromatic. Much modern potpourri consists of any decoratively shaped dried plant material (not necessarily from scented plants) with strong synthetic perfumes (and also often strongly coloured dyes) added, with the scent often bearing no relation to the plant material used. Sometimes, items which do not originate from plants are mixed in with the potpourri, to give it bulk and to make it more aesthetically pleasing. It is possible to spray scents onto potpourri, however a fixative is needed so that the scent is absorbed. Generally, orris root is used for this purpose. The word potpourri comes from the French word "pot-pourri," which was the French name for a Spanish stew with a wide ...