Dryland Wilds - New Mexico

what we do at Dryland Wilds:

make desert perfume from upcycled dryland plants. Our workshop is in Albuquerque on unceded Tiwa land, and we harvest unwanted plants throughout New Mexico and the southwest.  Using distillation, enfleurage, maceration, and tincturing we pull fragrance from the plants we harvest, sometimes blending these extracts with other longer lasting botanicals and sometimes offering just our pure extractions that capture the desert’s real scents of place.  Much of our fragrance extraction is done out in the desert or mountains at the site our of harvests, allowing us to gather the exact scent of the flower before it wilts.

handcraft botanical soaps, balms, and oils in small batches with organic oils and our artisanal desert perfumes.  We use no synthetic fragrances or artificial ingredients ever.

practice and teach sustainable wildcrafting in the high desert, prioritizing invasive and upcycled common plants for our fragrance harvests.  All native plant material that goes into our products is salvaged from sites that are removing them for construction, road maintenance, land management and fire pruning.  It's less than romantic but most of our harvests involve us following DOT (dirt) road graders, or being invited to come in and cut before the bulldozers show up.  We also work with private landowners, traveling to remote ranches and setting up perfume camp where we remove invasive flowers and enfleurage them. This helps bring ecosystems back into balance by reducing invasive seed set and protecting the watershed from glyphosates. We teach seasonal classes on sustainable wildcrafting - free to Indigenous, Black and QTBIPOC students upon request. For other students with financial support needs, sliding scale and trades for classes are available upon request.