Hoary Stock

Note Profile

Botanical

About

Sweet garden floral carrying a clove-like spice.

Scent Profile

Floral leads because every source describes a flower first and calls it heavily or highly fragrant. Warm_spice, second and not first: four sources agree on clove, but they say clove-LIKE and delicate, and one calls it a nuance released when you brush past the blooms. Carnation is published at warm_spice with floral, and inverting that order is the whole difference between the two. Sweet_vanillic is the repeated word sweet in 'sweet, spicy scent'. White_floral covers the white and cream cultivars that Wikipedia names first in the colour list, held low because the sources do not separate the scent of the pale forms from the coloured ones. Powdery is the soft, old-fashioned quality that the garden writing keeps reaching for. Below the naming line, honeyed and fresh_spice and green are present but unasserted: nothing in the evidence rules them out, and nothing names them either.

ScentWheel

Breadthbroad

EnvelopeHeart · ~5h lasting

Family Floral, Spicy

Read off the wheel, not a label applied to the note.

Origin

Hoary stock is the flower of Matthiola incana, a Brassicaceae grown across Europe for borders and for cutting. Wikipedia records the flowers as white, cream yellow, pink, red, purple or blue, and many cultivars as heavily scented. No commercial absolute, concrete or essential oil of this species could be found for this pass, so perfumery use means a reconstruction rather than an extract.

Usage in Perfumery

A heart floral for spring-garden and vintage-floral accords. It sits beside carnation, clove and wallflower. The historical name gillyflower covered stock, carnation and wallflower together, and the etymology (Greek karyophyllon, clove) is explained by the shared scent rather than by shared botany. Fragrantica lists the term on 5 fragrances and Parfumo on none, so it is rare in real formulae.