Go on, take a look.” The heat in the room was already intense and peering into the oven below me would simply make it searing. “Go on; the top’s off.” I thrust my face into the rush of heat.

Somewhere in the dark pit below was a ring of pink, bright pink rose petals with a small bowl sitting on them. I quickly shrank back, Sulaiman smiled and dropped the top back on.

I had wandered into Sulaiman’s cook house following the smell. Outside a trail of black soot wound its way up a wall; inside the room was a duotone of brown from the mud walls and black from years of smoke.

Roses are unexpected in Oman. In summer the temperature can reach over 50°C while in winter it hovers around 20°C.

However, ascend a couple of kilometres into the Jebel Akhdar mountains and winter frosts can grip the air and the summer heat barely reaches 30°C. Here is the land of the Omani rose – Rose Damask (Rosa amascena).

Quite how the rose bushes first reached Oman can only be speculated about; perhaps it was from ancient Persia where the rose has long been cultivated and whose ancient empire once included Oman.

But given the extraordinary intensification of Omani agriculture in the 17th century under the Yaroubi rulers, it may well have been brought across from Persia then.

What I had stumbled on was a key process in the manufacture of Oman’s sought after rose water. For many rose water producers in these mountains the start of their commercial success is the annual auction of the rights to harvest the rose petals from farmers who no longer manufacture the rose water.

In early April, potential buyers gather in the fields below the village of Shurayjah and walk together from field to field pausing only to conduct a mini auction when the rights to a field’s harvest for a year are available. Be the fields small, or relatively large, the competition can be intense and with prices topping RO800 for some larger fields, the auction clearly needs deep pockets.

The morning after my encounter with the fiery furnace, I woke early and arrived in time to join the rose petal harvesters as they worked. Time is of the essence for the rose needs plucking in the cool of morning before the intense aroma of the flower evaporates.

Plucking off the rose head encourages additional buds; a large bush may produce up to 3,000 blossoms during its season and a couple of hundred flowers may be ready for collection each morning.