Winter Foraging Notes: Black Cottonwood with a Natural Cinnamon Scent

December 31, 2025

By late November, the forest is mostly quiet. The flowers are gone. The understory has pulled back. What’s left are the evergreens. Fir and cedar. Lichen on bark. Wet leaves and cold air.

This is usually a slower season for me. Less harvesting. More waiting. Winter foraging looks different, and most of the work shifts to evergreens, bark, and materials meant for long extractions.

Then I smelled cinnamon.

I was walking through Tradition Lake when it came through the air. It wasn’t sweet or spicy in a bakery way. Just warm. Dry. Very clear. I stopped walking and stood there for a minute, trying to figure out where it was coming from.

The rest of the hike turned into an investigation.

I smelled the fern roots growing along tree trunks. I smelled the rot of fallen maple leaves. I kept moving slowly, stopping when the scent appeared and then disappeared again. It felt like the forest was letting it out in pieces.

Eventually I noticed it on the buds of fallen black cottonwood branches.

It was late November and the branches had clearly been down for a while. The buds weren’t fresh. Still, they carried that same cinnamon warmth I had noticed in the air.

I brought several branches home and started cutting them up for tincture and oil infusion. At first the smell was nice but not intense. Interesting, but not enough to feel certain about.

Then I cut into one branch and everything changed.

The inside of the branch was almost black. The color ran through the whole branch. And the smell was suddenly strong. Not sweet. Not sharp. Just solid and present.

That was the material. I didn’t use any of the lighter wood after that.

I focused only on the dark interior pieces.

After about four weeks, I started testing the infusions.

One drop of the alcohol tincture on my skin lasted more than ten hours. It didn’t project loudly, but it stayed. It didn’t fade into something else. It stayed true. The longevity surprised me, especially for a botanical tincture this young.

The oil infusion was softer and rounder. The tincture was exact. It smelled like the air did when I first noticed it on the trail. Like that moment standing still in the forest trying to place the scent.

That’s not common, especially this early. Most botanical perfume materials need much longer to show themselves this clearly.

This is the reason I do this work.

Not to recreate something. Not to build a formula. But to hold onto a moment that would otherwise disappear. To take something that existed briefly in the forest air and give it a longer life through tincture and time.

In winter, when everything seems quiet, the forest is still offering things. Fir and cedar. Lichen. And sometimes black cottonwood.

This material will shape what comes next.