Broadstairs Botanicals is a not for profit enterprise looking to make the most of the beautiful plant life we have growing around Thanet.
Lots of gardens have beautiful aromatic plants that grow in them every year. Whether they are in your back garden, or some of the town gardens, these plants bloom and give off their fragrance to delight young and old. However, each year they are cut back to allow them to burst forth with new life in the next year.
This is the raw material that Broadstairs Botanicals wants to make use of. Rather than throw the cuttings onto the compost, we can turn them into aromatic oils and waters, to make the kind of solutions that have been created in Britain for almost a thousand years. The sort of extracts that would be familiar to the monks who lived in Thanet in the Middle Ages.
The monks of yesteryear and the therapists of today know that these oils and waters ease the mind and soothe the soul. As we face an increasingly stressful world Broadstairs Botanicals wants to create these solutions and give them back to the people of Thanet, especially to the groups who may not be able to afford the ones sold in stores. We will be reaching out to various other charities and CIC's to see if we can gift some of these solutions. The hope is that lavender from a back garden in one house can find its way into the home of someone who lives on the isle of Thanet.
So we will be looking to turn people's lavender, bay, rosemary, mint, sage etc into hydrosols (water solutions) and oils. It is important to us that we are thinking as locally and sustainably as possible. The distillation glassware comes from a Thanet manufacturer; the labels on the bottles and the pump for the production come from Broadstairs High Street. We hope that the bottles that we use will be recycled and re-gifted from local people, saving them going into the energy intensive recycling process. The oil that is burned to extract the oils and hydrosols is made from plant based ethanol rather than any fossil fuel.
