Jasmine, Jasminum, is a genus of climbing shrubs bearing intensely fragrant, usually white, star-shaped flowers, native to Asia; the name comes through Persian yasmin. Many jasmines release their scent at night, opening and perfuming the dark, which shaped a symbolism of love, sensuality and the moon. In India jasmine is among the most sacred and beloved of flowers, strung into garlands for weddings, worn in the hair, and offered to deities; it is associated with love and with the god Kama, whose arrows of desire were tipped, in the poets, with jasmine and other flowers.
Jasmine flowers are picked before dawn, while their scent is most concentrated, for the perfume industry centred historically on Grasse in the south of France, and jasmine absolute, extracted by a delicate solvent process because the blossoms are too fragile for steam distillation, remains among the most expensive natural materials in perfumery, requiring a very large weight of hand-picked flowers to yield a small quantity of oil. Not every jasmine serves the perfumer or the temple: of more than two hundred Jasminum species, only a handful, chiefly Jasminum grandiflorum and Jasminum sambac, the sambac jasmine already noted for its sacred use, are grown commercially for scent, the great majority remaining ornamental or entirely undeveloped species.