Fragrant Garden: Price £1.00
20 slow-burning sticks of pure high-quality Fair Trade incense, made from all natural, local ingredients by village women at the Sri Aurobindo ashram in Pondicherry, south India. Made from masala paste hand-rolled onto split bamboo sticks, and packaged in handmade paper made from recycled rags and banana stalks. Available in the following scents:

Variety Pack I (Amber, Sandalwood & Nectar)
Variety Pack II (Rose, Jasmine & Musk)
Variety Pack III (Patchouli, Himalayan Cedar & Lemon Grass)
Spring Bouquet (blend of vetivert & violet)
Indian Summer (tube rose)
Autumn Harmony
Amber
Cinnamon
Eucalyptus
Geranium
Himalayan Cedar
Jasmine
Lemon Grass
Lotus
Musk (musk rose)
Myrrh
Nectar
Patchouli
Pine
Pot Pourri
Rose
Sandalwood
Vanilla
Wild Orchid

Spiritual Sky: Price £1.00
20 sticks of this popular, high-quality incense, made in New Zealand by dipping a base stick into high-grade essential oils. We prefer to stock Fragrant Garden incense (above) where possible as it is Fair Traded and eco-friendly, but because Fragrant Garden incense is made only from local ingredients, we carry Spiritual Sky for those scents which are in popular demand and which are evidently not local to Pondicherry. Available in:

Coconut
Frankincense

Nag Champa: Price £1.00
20 sticks of genuine Sai Baba Nag Champa incense. This slow-burning incense, made from a hand-rolled blend of flowers, spices and resins, is said to be the most popular in the world. The scent is sweet and slightly heavy but not sickly. This is the sort of incense people mean when they say "The room smelled of incense."

Tibetan Healing Incense: Price £1.50
20 hand-rolled, Fair Traded incense sticks. This incense is primarily medicinal rather than recreational.

As far as I can determine, this seems to be the same incense as Aquilaria Aromatic Tibetan Healing Incense, which is made by the same people and packaged in almost identical boxes. It appears to be simply Aquilaria re-packaged to carry the name of a particular importer.

In this packaging it does not have the leaflet which comes with Aquilaria, but since it seems to be the same stuff then the information in the Aquilaria leaflet presumably applies. According to that leaflet this incense is made from 31 herbs, to a recipe reported to have been taken from centuries-old Tibetan medical texts. It is said to help cases of vertigo; headache; nausea due to low oxygen-levels; altitude-sickness; stress; insomnia; back & chest pain; stiffness; and muscle pain with a psychosomatic element. It can be burned and inhaled, or crumbled into a base oil (the manufacturers recommend sesame oil or melted butter) and used as a massage-rub to alleviate muscle-stiffness and gastric problems. When burned it can also be used as a meditation-aid. Its smell is neither pleasant nor unpleasant: something like a traditional log fire.

The only problem with this incense is that it is just incense, rolled into rods, without the usual supporting wood or bamboo sliver. This results in a very pure scent, with no burning wood to complicate matters, but it means the sticks break easily and don't fit into a normal holder. We sometimes have very small candlesticks with a hole the right size for this stuff, or if requested we can drill a suitable wide-bore hole into a standard wooden ash-catcher for you; failing that, one end of the incense-stick will need to be embedded in something suitable, such as a bowl of sand.

Namasteji incense cones: Price 65p
16 eccentrically-spelled but good-quality Indian-made 1" incense cones: some packets also include a metal disc to sit the lighted cone on. Cones are a pig to light and don't usually burn very long, but they give a very pure scent because they contain no wooden stick. We get these in in packs of mixed scents, so it's pot-luck what fragrances we will have in at any one time - just e-mail us to check that we have the one you want. Potentially available in the following scents (O/S means a particular scent is currently out of stock):

Amber
Champa O/S
Frangipani O/S
Frankincense O/S
Green Apple O/S
Jasmine
Lavander
Laurier O/S (no, I don't know what that is either!)
Lotus
Magnolia O/S
Musk
Night Queen
Opium
Patchouli
Peppermint O/S
Pine
Rasbrri O/S
Rhopodendron O/S
Rose
Sandal
Strawberry O/S
Vanila

Charcoal: Price £1.50
10 1¼" discs of Excelsior charcoal, for burning rock and herbal incenses.