Progress in Essential Oils

Mountain Savory Oil

Savory oil of commerce is known to be produced from both Satureja hortensis L. and Satureja montana L. This latter member of the Lamiaceae is a perennial taxon that can exist in numerous subspecies forms, although the one commonly used for oil production is S. montana L. subsp. montana, which can be found growing from Spain to southern Albania.

Chizzola (2003) examined the compositions of the volatiles of four populations of S. montana from France. The populations were collected from Utelle (Alpes-Maritime at 830–850 m), Rougon (Alpes-de-Haute-Provence at 950 m), Mont Ventou (Vaucluse at 1080–1090 m) and Plateau de Gras (Ardéche at 210 m). The first three populations were found growing in the pre-Alps limestone region, while the fourth was growing west of the Rhone on a limestone plateau.

The author obtained representative volatile concentrates by extracting 0.2–0.3 g of the leaves of single plants using 1.5–2.0 mL of methylene chloride in an ultrasonic bath for 30 min. After filtration, the extract was directly analyzed using GC/MS only. The variability of 11 selected components of 33–40 analyses of all populations, except for the one from Utelle, can be seen in T-1. The variability in the quantitative results is not unexpected, even though the plants harvested were all flowering, because the small sample taken from each plant was not sufficient to average out within plant variation that is known to occur within the Lamiaceae family. Finally, it was revealed that the population from Utelle was mixed between the carvacrol forms and the linalool forms so that data will not be reported.

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