What is Potpourri?

Series Summary

There is no denying that people love the smell of a good fragrance. The perfume and air freshener business is booming, and so it is no wonder that people love using potpourri to make their homes smell nice. Potpourri is a mixture of fragrant plants which have been dried, mixed together and sometimes simmered over a candle flame. They are often gentle in scent and contain natural fragrances from plants like cedar, juniper, rose petals and lavender. Other popular items in potpourri are pine cones, jasmine, cinnamon bark and natural oils. It is often kept in decorative wooden or glass bowls, but can be added to small bags in order to make potpourri sachets.

In this free video series, our expert will show you how to make homemade potpourri. You will get expert tips on what potpourri is made of, and how you can dry our plants and flowers to make your own potpourri. Get step-by-step instructions for using lavender, and rose petals, adding color and texture to your potpourri and mixing in essential oils. You will also learn how to make potpourri sachets and display your homemade potpourri.

Video Transcript

"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 actually buy dried, some of it I dry myself. I have little baby rose buds. These happen to be pink and they do well. And then I have lemon verbena which is just really a nice pleasing scent and it works out really well."